The Olive of the Orange Courtyard

This tree is on a map drawn in 1741, which is a rarer thing than being old. Most claims about an ancient tree's age come from tradition; this one comes from an inventory of the courtyard that counted, alongside the olive, ninety-five orange trees, six cypresses, ten palms and a chinaberry. Two and a half centuries later roughly half its trunk is gone. It hollowed through the twentieth century, decayed badly from the 1980s, and what leans toward the fountain now is a shell that still manages about sixty kilos of olives a year. The cathedral chapter has conserved what remains and planted a young olive nearby to take over eventually. In 2018 researchers took leaf and fruit samples without harming it and found a cultivar barely recorded anywhere else, which they have proposed naming after the city. The fountain beside it is officially the Fuente de Santa Maria, finished in December 1741, but everyone calls its spout the Cano del Olivo, after the tree. Suitors were once told to drink from it for luck in love.