La Pochota

Chiapa de Corzo's town square was built around this tree, not the other way round. When Diego de Mazariegos founded the settlement on the bank of the Grijalva river in 1528, a ceiba already stood where the plaza now sits, and Mexico's national heritage institute records that its position was used as a fixed point when the town's original street grid was laid out. The tree has outlasted more than the founding. In 1945 a neighbour, irritated by the cotton-like fluff it sheds every dry season, set part of it alight; the fire destroyed roughly a third of the crown before townspeople put it out, and one scorched limb kept growing regardless, still part of the canopy today. Chiapas declared it the state's first Historic and Notable Tree in 1993, a status now shared nationally with only two others, the Árbol del Tule in Oaxaca and Mexico City's Árbol de la Noche Triste. Nobody has cored La Pochota to date it. The state's own anniversary notices put its documented history at over 500 years, tied to the 1528 founding; older local tradition rounds that up to a thousand. Some Mexican press describes it as over sixty metres tall, a figure no survey backs and one the tree's own silhouette against the plaza's two-storey arcades does not support.