Salamanca's old sandstone centre holds a small cluster of trees that do not belong in a Castilian climate at all. A coast redwood has grown in the university's own cloister since 1870, and a giant sequoia was lifted into the square facing the cathedral in 1976, both species built for wetter, cooler places than a city 800 metres up and baked dry every summer. Closer to home, the park's own 'grandfather' cedar has watched over La Alamedilla since the 1880s, and a lone yew keeps its place in a formal plaza nobody has bothered to explain.
0 / 4 visités à Salamanca
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The Sequoia of the University
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · about 155 years, documented planting · Centro
The University of Salamanca has been teaching since 1218, and the oldest living thing it owns arrived in 1870. That year Federico de Onis y Onis donated a coast redwood, which went into the courtyard of the Escuelas Mayores and has been there since, 27 metres tall with a trunk 2.64 metres round. A local newspaper calls it the institution's oldest living monument, at roughly 156 years, which makes it comfortably the youngest thing in a patio otherwise made of Renaissance stone.
Coast redwood belongs on a fog belt in northern California, where it is the tallest tree species on earth and routinely clears 100 metres. Salamanca is dry, baked in summer and 800 metres above the sea, which is not that climate at all. A redwood that has held on here for a century and a half inside a walled courtyard is doing something the species never evolved to do.
One caution about the paperwork. The regional register of notable trees carries a Sequoia de la Universidad as AS-SA-10 with those measurements, and the newspaper account of the 1870 donation describes the redwood in the Escuelas Mayores courtyard without naming the register entry. Only one sequoia is on record in that complex, so they are almost certainly the same tree, but no single source says so outright.
The Escuelas Mayores charges entry. The tree is on the visitor route inside.
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2
The Giant Sequoia of Plaza de Anaya
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · about 60-70 years since it was transplanted here as a young tree in 1976 · Centro
This tree could outlive the cathedral it faces. Giant sequoias run past two thousand years in the Sierra Nevada; Salamanca's new cathedral was begun in 1513 and finished in the eighteenth century, and the sequoia in the square in front of it was lifted into place in 1976, already roughly ten to twenty years old, by order of the mayor Pablo Beltran de Heredia y Onis. A plaque at the base records the donation.
1976 was Spain's first full year without Franco, with the country in the middle of deciding what it would become next. Somewhere in that, a decision was taken to move a Californian conifer into the Plaza de Anaya, the square held between the Cathedral, the Anaya Palace and the church of San Sebastian, which is about as much architecture as Salamanca can put in one place.
It was measured at about 20 metres in 2020, with a dense green canopy, strong growth and no visible structural damage. That puts it somewhere near 60 to 70 years old today, an adolescent for a species that counts in millennia, and it is worth being clear that this is an estimate built from the transplant date rather than a figure anyone has cored out of the wood.
Everything else in the square is finished. This is the one thing in it that will look different in a hundred years.
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3
The Cedar of La Alamedilla (Pino de San Jose)
Cedar (Cedrus libani, possibly a Cedrus libani x deodara hybrid; disputed, see notes) · roughly 130 years · Alamedilla
Salamanca calls this tree the Pino de San Jose, and it is not a pine. It is a cedar, and even that is not settled. The plaque on it reads Cedrus libani, the cedar of Lebanon, while Juan Manuel Velasco, who wrote the book on the province's parks and gardens, argues from the leaves that it is more likely a hybrid with the Himalayan Cedrus deodara. Neither reading has won.
It went into the ground between 1880 and 1890, alongside the elms planted when La Alamedilla was laid out as a public park from 1879, the elms that gave the place its name. Those are gone. The cedar is the tallest tree in the park and one of the last survivors of that first planting, which is why the city calls it the grandfather of the Alamedilla, and why generations of Salamantinos have a childhood memory attached to it.
The numbers disagree as well, and the disagreement is worth seeing. One newspaper, citing municipal measurements from 2018, gives 4.30 metres as a diameter at chest height and a height over 25 metres. Another gives 4.30 metres as the trunk's perimeter and a height of 33. A diameter of 4.30 would mean a girth around 13.5 metres, which would make this one of the largest conifers in Europe and is not credible at roughly 130 years. Read it as a girth and the figures behave.
Storms have taken branches in recent years. It still stands.
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4
The Yew of Plaza de la Libertad
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Centro
Most of Salamanca's yews are new. The four planted around the Columbus statue in the Parque de Colon are about three decades old, which for a yew is barely a start. The one at the corner of the Plaza de la Libertad and Calle Concejo is a different proposition: a full-grown tejo standing in the middle of the old city, listed by the local press among Salamanca's notable trees and known simply as the great yew of the square.
The ground under it was an orchard. The plaza was laid out from 1842 on the site of the convent garden of the Carmelitas Descalzas de San Elias, and it has been replanted repeatedly since: acacias first, then plane trees, then cypress and palms. The yew appears in none of those accounts. Either it arrived between the waves or it has outlasted the record of who planted what. By one account of the plaza it stands out of line with the formal symmetry of the layout, and the gardeners have kept it where it is rather than tidy it away.
That is the argument for going. Yew is the slow species, the one European churchyards are full of because it will still be standing when the building needs work, and it carries age better than anything else that will grow through a Castilian summer.
Nobody has published an age, a height or a girth for this tree. If you know any of the three, tell us.
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