The Holm Oak of the Viana Palace

Twelve courtyards, eighteen noble families, five centuries of owners, and the oldest inhabitant of the house is a tree. The palace calls this holm oak four hundred years old, which would make it older than most of the building around it, and at over twenty-five metres it rises clear above the roofline, so you see it from the street before you have paid to go in. It stands in the middle of a garden that only became a garden in 1814, when the seventh Marquis of Villaseca bought the land and laid it out in the French manner with sixteen box parterres that are themselves two centuries old now. Against the walls grow espaliered lemon, lime, mandarin, orange and grapefruit, the oldest plants in the palace after the oak itself. A holm oak is an evergreen, so there is no season to catch it in: the leaves are small, dark and leathery, closer to an olive's than to the lobed oak leaf on an English pub sign, and they stay all year. Worth knowing before you go: the four-century figure rests on the palace's own account, with no forestry survey behind it.