The Cypress of the Alcazar Entrance

Twenty-six and a half metres tall on a crown three and a half metres wide. That is a proportion closer to a lamp post than a tree, and it is what a Mediterranean cypress does when it is left to grow the way it wants: straight up, in one dark column, branches held so tight to the trunk that the whole thing reads as a single line. It stands outside the ticket gate of the Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos, which means it costs nothing to see. Everything else here is behind the wall and behind a turnstile: the long pools, the clipped hedges, the fortress Alfonso XI built in 1328, where Ferdinand and Isabella later held court and where the Inquisition ran its tribunal for three centuries. The cypress is the one thing the city left on the outside. It is also young. Cordoba's catalogue of singular trees put it at about seventy-seven years when it was surveyed, and a register age is always the age on the day somebody wrote it down, so add whatever has passed since. That catalogue is the only source describing this tree at all. Cypresses run to several centuries, which makes this one barely started, and it is on the list anyway because of the shape rather than the years. Stand at the base and look up the column: there is almost nothing between you and the top of it.