The Chinaberry of the Puerta de Almodóvar

Four hundred square metres of shade, thrown by a species most cities plant as a modest street tree. Chinaberries usually stop somewhere around ten metres. This one is twenty-four and a half, which makes it less a tree in the gardens at the Puerta de Almodovar than the ceiling over them, and the reason people look up before they look at the gate. Cordoba's own catalogue of singular trees measured it at about seventy-two years old, and a register age is the age on the day somebody wrote it down, so add what has passed since. That catalogue is the only source that has dated it. Local guides to the gate describe a giant cinamomo standing here, using the Spanish name for the species, which confirms the tree and what it is without confirming its years, so read the age as the city's estimate rather than a settled fact. The gate beside it has six centuries on it either way. What stands today is a fourteenth-century Christian rebuild on the line of an older Arab gate, and the wall running from it towards the Alcazar is the one the tree grows against. Melia azedarach came out of southern Asia and spread through Mediterranean cities for the shade and the lilac blossom, and its hard seed stones were strung as rosary beads, which is how the species picked up its other name of bead tree.