The Plane Trees of the Paco dos Duques

Most of what you see is younger than what grows beneath it. Building work on the Paco dos Duques began in 1420 for Afonso, illegitimate son of King Joao I and soon to be the first Duke of Braganza, and it was never finished. The palace slid into ruin after 1616, when Guimaraes itself was handed to a Spanish nobleman, and by the nineteenth century what was left housed an infantry barracks. The building tourists photograph today, with its steep slate roofs and half-timbered galleries, is largely a 1937 to 1959 reconstruction: the regime of the Estado Novo added two full floors to the front wing and a third to the sides, remaking a shell into the national monument it wanted Guimaraes, self-styled cradle of Portugal, to have. These two plane trees on the grassy slope below the walls predate that rebuild by decades. Measured at 150 years in 2011, they were already thick-trunked when the scaffolding went up. The larger, four and a half metres round, rises twenty-nine metres; its partner a few strides away is a size smaller, twenty-two metres tall. Stand between them and look up at the palace: the trees are the only part of the view that nobody had to reconstruct.