Zaragoza's trees are unusually well documented and unusually undated. The city catalogued 57 singular trees in 2006 and measured every one, girth at the base, girth at chest height, height and crown, and recorded no ages at all. Four of them make a walk of under two kilometres along the buried course of the river Huerva, from a park that was a banker's private garden until 1959 to a university building of 1893. Two of the trees stand in that one park.
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The Almez of Parque Bruil
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · Centennial, no exact figure recorded, probably around 150 years · Tenerias, Casco Historico
In December 2025 this tree came third in Spain, with 1,799 votes, in a national poll for tree of the year. It was put forward not by the city but by the neighbourhood associations of San Agustin, Tenerias, La Madalena, Las Fuentes and San Miguel, which is a fair description of who actually uses the park. It is a hackberry, called almez or litonero here, fifteen metres tall and just over four metres round at chest height. What it grew up in is the interesting part. Juan Bruil, a Zaragoza banker who was briefly finance minister in 1854, bought the old Augustinian estate here in 1842 and had French gardeners lay out grounds around it. He stocked them with deer, pheasants, swans and monkeys, built an auditorium and commissioned a roller coaster, and let the public in on Sundays. The city did not own the land until 1959, and the park as it stands opened in 1965. The tree has had a harder recent decade than that history suggests: in 2015 residents asked the council to look at it because feet had compacted the soil over its roots, and in 2017 it was fenced. It now looks the better for it.
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2
The Holm Oak of Parque Bruil
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · Not recorded, probably 150 to 180 years · Tenerias, Casco Historico
This is the tree the neighbourhood meets at. In February 2012 a public gathering was called with the instruction to meet at the holm oak of Parque Bruil, and the reason was not affection but alarm: work remodelling the park had cut into its root plate and the tree had no protection plan of any kind. Holm oak is the native oak of this dry country, evergreen, small dark leaves furred pale underneath, and it was one of the species Juan Bruil's French gardeners put in when they laid out these grounds after 1842, alongside mulberries and plums and a great deal of imported novelty. The city measured it at two metres forty round at chest height and fourteen metres tall in 2004, which for a species that grows slowly on thin Aragonese soil is a considerable tree. What it has watched is a long argument about who the ground belongs to. It stood in a private garden that opened to the public one day a week, then in an estate the city spent years expropriating, and since 1965 in a public park that has been dug up and rebuilt around it more than once. It is still here.
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3
The London Plane of Calle Asalto
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Not recorded · Tenerias, Casco Historico
The street is named after the thing that happened to it. In February 1809 French troops finally broke into Zaragoza through the medieval wall along this line, ending a second siege that had cost the city tens of thousands of lives and had been conducted, by the end, house by house. A stretch of that wall still stands opposite this tree. The plane itself is two metres eighty round at chest height and seventeen metres tall, growing out of a pavement beside a busy road, and the city's catalogue lists its single reason for protection as size. It carries large pruning stubs where structural branches were taken off, which is what happens to a big tree on a narrow street. London plane is a hybrid that has never been found growing wild, and it became the standard European street tree for one reason: it sheds its bark in plates, and with the bark goes the soot, which mattered enormously in a nineteenth century city and still matters here. Stand with your back to the wall the French came through, and the tree is the older-looking of the two things in front of you.
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4
The Yew of the Paraninfo
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · Not recorded · Centro
There is one yew in Zaragoza's register of singular trees, and this is it. The catalogue gives its reason for protection as the species being very uncommon in the city, which is a polite way of saying that a tree of cool wet northern churchyards has no business in a place that spends August above thirty five degrees. It is thirteen metres tall and one metre twenty round, and it is one of a pair, both male, so neither will ever carry the red berries that yews are known for. What they stand in front of is Ricardo Magdalena's Faculty of Medicine and Sciences, projected in 1886 and inaugurated on 18 October 1893, a building of brick and ceramic in a deliberately Aragonese key that now serves as the university's ceremonial hall, its general library and its natural sciences museum. Local tradition holds that these two yews are survivors of an older botanical garden on this ground, and that would make them older than everything around them. It is a good story and the evidence for it is thin, so treat it as a story. Yews are slow, dense and long lived, and this one is doing something its species is not built for.
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5
The Olive of the Facultad de Medicina
Olive (Olea europaea) · not documented · Campus San Francisco
Four metres ninety around at the ground and two metres fifty at chest height, on a tree only five metres tall. That is an olive doing what olives do: pouring everything into a fluted, folded, half-hollow base while the crown stays low enough to pick from a short ladder.
It grows on the University of Zaragoza's San Francisco campus, behind the Facultad de Medicina and the Colegio Mayor Pedro Cerbuna, on ground the city's own ordinance lists as university property rather than municipal. Zaragoza's catalogue of singular trees rated its condition very good when it was surveyed in 2005, and that catalogue is the only source that describes it.
Nobody has dated it, and with an olive nobody easily could. The heartwood rots out of the middle of an old olive and what survives is a ring of living wood that splits into separate strands, so there are no rings left to count and the tree can renew itself from the base more or less indefinitely. Estimates for olives of this shape run from two hundred years to well over a thousand, and a number picked out of that range would be a guess wearing a decimal point.
What the girth does say is that the tree is almost certainly older than the campus around it. This edge of Zaragoza was farmland before the faculties arrived, and an olive that wide was somebody's crop long before it was a specimen.
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6
The Honey Locust of Calle Aznar Molina
Honey Locust (Gleditsia triacanthos) · not documented · Tenerias, Casco Historico
Somebody took three main branches out of this tree and it became a parasol. The honey locust on Calle Aznar Molina now carries a flat, wide, almost horizontal crown on a short trunk, a shape no honey locust arrives at by itself, and it makes this one of the strangest-looking protected trees in Zaragoza. The city's catalogue records the pruning as plain fact and rated the tree's condition good when it was surveyed in 2005.
Gleditsia triacanthos is North American, from the Mississippi basin, and in its wild form it is armed: branched thorns up to fifteen centimetres long growing straight out of the trunk and the older wood, generally read as a defence against browsing animals that no longer exist on that continent. Street plantings are usually the thornless kind, chosen for the fine doubled leaves that cast a light, moving shade and fall small enough that nobody has to rake them.
It stands in Tenerias, the old tanners' quarter on the edge of the historic centre, three hundred metres from the trees of Parque Bruil, so it joins that walk without a detour. The catalogue is the only source that names it, and it records no age for it.
Stand directly underneath and look up. The flat crown against the sky is the entire point of this tree.
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7
The Tree of Heaven of the Jardin Botanico
Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) · not documented · Parque Grande
Zaragoza protects, as a singular tree, a specimen of the species European cities spend the most money trying to get rid of. Ailanthus altissima was sent to Europe from Beijing by a Jesuit missionary in 1751 and planted as a fast curiosity and a possible host for silkworms. It escaped. It now takes over railway sidings, demolition plots and riverbanks across southern Europe, resprouts from any cut root, releases a compound that suppresses the plants around it, and sits on the European Union's list of invasive species of concern.
This one earned its place by being the best of its kind here. Of the four tree of heaven specimens on the city's register, this is the one rated in very good condition at the 2004 survey: two metres fifty-seven around, fifteen metres seventy tall, standing at the entrance to the botanical garden inside the Parque Grande.
It is a handsome tree when something keeps it in order. The leaves are pinnate and can reach a metre in length, very large for anything hardy in Europe, and in a good summer the female trees hang thick with papery winged seeds that turn from green to a dull red before they go brown.
The catalogue is the only source describing this tree, and it gives no age. What it gives instead is a judgement, and the judgement is that of four candidates this was the one worth keeping.
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