What is the oldest tree in Cordoba?
The oldest tree in Cordoba is the olive beside the fountain in the Patio de los Naranjos, the orange courtyard of the Mezquita-Catedral. It already appears on a plan of the courtyard drawn in 1741, which makes it around 285 years old, and it is documented rather than estimated. The Patio is free to enter daily, so this is one ancient tree that costs nothing to stand in front of.
Half of its trunk is gone. The tree hollowed through the twentieth century and decayed badly from the 1980s, so what leans toward the fountain today is a shell that still produces about sixty kilos of olives a year, and the cathedral chapter has planted a young olive nearby as its eventual successor. In 2018 researchers sampled its leaves and fruit without harming it and found a local cultivar barely recorded anywhere else, which they have proposed naming after the city. Tourist copy sometimes calls the tree a thousand years old; there is no basis for that, and the 1741 plan is the actual evidence. The only tree in Cordoba that may be older is the holm oak in the garden of the Palacio de Viana, which the palace says has stood for four centuries and which rises above the roofline at over twenty-five metres, though that age rests on the palace's own word rather than on any survey. Everything else in the city is younger than it looks.
One of Cordoba's trees also appears in Autumn Worth the Trip, a themed collection spanning several cities.