Granada plants its trees the way it builds its gardens: behind walls, inside monastery grounds, up palace hillsides, rarely as an afterthought. A mystic poet planted one with his own hands while awaiting canonisation of a very different kind. A tree measured decades before botanists had formally described its own species grows two centuries downhill of that. Between the Alhambra's forest and the private carmenes of the Albaicin, this list draws on the city's own scattered singular-tree research rather than any single register, because Granada, unusually for a city this documented, has never compiled one.
0 / 9 Granadaで訪れた数
写真：Jose Manuel ("Mazintosh") (CC BY 2.0)
1
The Cypress of San Juan de la Cruz
Mexican Cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) · approximately 440 years · Antequeruela
This cypress is not native to Spain, or even to the continent it is usually associated with. Hesperocyparis lusitanica, despite its name, comes from Mexico and Central America, and reached Europe through Carmelite missionaries who brought it first to Portugal, then into Spain's own monastery gardens. One of those Carmelites was San Juan de la Cruz, the mystic and poet, who served as prior of the Convent of the Martyrs here between 1582 and 1588, by his own order's account the calmest and most productive years of his life. Tradition holds he planted this tree himself, using his prior's staff, choosing the species as a personal symbol for reaching heaven. It was here that he shaped the poems he had first composed from memory in a Toledo prison, including the verses that became Dark Night of the Soul. Roughly two decades ago lightning tore away a significant part of the crown, and the tree still shows the damage today, new growth sprouting from the truncated stump rather than a single unbroken trunk. It survives regardless, in a free public garden that still keeps much of the convent's original layout, lake and orchard included.
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2
The Sequoias of the Generalife's Upper Gardens
Coast Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) · approximately 170 years · Alhambra
Coast redwoods reached Europe in 1843, and Granada planted some of the continent's first within little more than a decade, sequoias going into the Generalife's Upper Gardens between 1854 and 1856, while the gardens were still privately owned ground. Sequoia sempervirens can live three thousand years and grow past 100 metres in its native California; these specimens, still comparatively young, have nonetheless become some of the tallest living things inside the Alhambra complex. Granada's connection to the species runs oddly deeper than that planting date suggests. In 1926 an American botanist examining a separate, older redwood elsewhere on the grounds calculated it was roughly 120 years old, old enough to have been planted before European science had formally identified the coast redwood at all, a puzzle eventually attributed to Thaddaeus Haenke, a naturalist on the 1791 Malaspina expedition who is thought to have carried seed back from California decades before the species reached botanical record books. That original mystery tree died sometime before 2002. The sequoias standing in the Upper Gardens today are the later, better-documented planting, reachable only with a paid, timed Alhambra and Generalife ticket.
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3
The Ginkgo of the Botanical Garden
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · approximately 135 years · Centro
This was the first ginkgo Granada ever grew, planted in 1889 in a garden that had itself only existed since 1840, on ground that used to be the vegetable orchard of a Jesuit college before the University of Granada's Faculty of Law took over the site. Ginkgo biloba is the last living member of a plant order that once grew across the entire planet during the age of dinosaurs, a lineage so isolated botanists sometimes call it a living fossil, and this specimen's fan-shaped leaves, turning a uniform gold each November, still look almost identical to fossil ginkgo leaves more than 200 million years old. The species is famous for a harder kind of survival too: six ginkgos within roughly a mile of Hiroshima's atomic bomb epicentre lived through the blast and are still growing today, a fact this specimen's own garden plaque, next to a poem written for the tree by the Granada poet Elena Martin Vivaldi, does not fail to mention. The garden is open to the public on university working days, free of charge, tucked behind the Faculty of Law's own building in the city centre.
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4
The Palms of the Archbishop's Palace
Mexican Fan Palm (Washingtonia robusta) · approximately 100 years · Centro
Four Mexican fan palms tower over Plaza de Gracia, planted in 1923 the year construction finished on the Palacio de los Yanguas, the building bordering the square behind a garden wall on Calle Gracia. Architect Fernando Wilhelmi built it between 1920 and 1925 for the family of the Marquis of Casablanca; it later became the seat of Granada's Diocesan Curia, the archdiocese's administrative offices, which is why it is still known locally as the Archbishop's palace even though it was never built as one. Washingtonia robusta grows faster and taller than almost any other palm cultivated in southern Spain, capable of clearing 30 metres given a century, and this quartet has had almost exactly that long: over 100 years of growth, planted deliberately rather than surviving by accident, the way many of the city's oldest trees have. The species takes its genus name from Washington and its specific name from its robust trunk, an American import that became fashionable across southern European cities in the early 20th century for exactly the effect it produces here, four columns of green rising well above the surrounding rooftops. Visible from across the square is as close as most visitors get, since the palace's own garden is not open to the public.
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写真：Iblancasa (CC BY-SA 3.0)
5
The Plane Trees of the Fountain of Battles
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · undated, mature · Realejo
Four enormous plane trees give Plaza del Campillo its identity, ringing a baroque stone fountain whose own history is less certain than the trees that shade it. The fountain, known as the Fuente de las Batallas for the medieval army musters once held on this ground outside the city's old walls, may originally have belonged to a 17th century convent before arriving at its current spot only in 1950. The planes around it are considerably younger than that origin story but still large enough that their trunks run past five metres around and their crowns reach roughly 30 metres, tall enough to be visible over the surrounding rooftops of the Realejo district. No individual planting date survives for these specific trees, honestly left undated rather than guessed, but their scale alone has made the square one of central Granada's most consistently used gathering spots, host to concerts during the city's spring singer-songwriter festival and its annual book fair.
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写真：Ben Thomas (CC BY 4.0)
6
The Robinia of Cuarto Real de Santo Domingo
Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) · approximately 200 years · Realejo
This robinia has become famous enough in Granada to appear on a national lottery ticket. In 2023 the Spanish blind people's organisation ONCE printed the tree on five million tickets as part of a series celebrating Spain's most emblematic urban trees, alongside the Granada city council's own logo, a considerable amount of public recognition for a species usually valued for fence posts rather than beauty. What makes this specimen worth printing is its trunk: barely 7.5 metres tall, modest for the species, but swollen to roughly 4.6 metres in girth, thick and deeply weathered enough that it reads as far older than its estimated two centuries. It grows directly outside the entrance to the Cuarto Real de Santo Domingo, the best-preserved surviving palace pavilion from Granada's Almohad and early Nazarid period, standing in the small public square in front of the monument rather than requiring the monument's own separate admission fee. Each May its branches fill with hanging clusters of white flowers, drawing a very different kind of attention than its trunk does the rest of the year.
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7
The Twin Cypresses of the Parador
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · centenarian, undated · Alhambra
Two centenarian cypresses flank what was once the entrance to a set of royal tombs, inside a garden that has spent the last five centuries as a Franciscan convent, then a hotel. The Parador de Granada occupies the former Convento de San Francisco, built in the 15th century within the Alhambra's own walls, on ground the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella briefly chose as their own burial place before their remains moved to the Royal Chapel in the city below. The garden that grew up around the convent later became a botanical showcase laid out with identifying labels for each species, mixing Mediterranean natives, lavender, thyme, rosemary, with the pines, figs and cypresses planted for height and structure, these two flanking the site's most historically loaded doorway. The Parador remains a working hotel, and its garden sits technically on private grounds, but the café and restaurant terrace opens directly onto it, meaning any visitor willing to buy a coffee can walk the same paths past the same trees that once shaded a monarch's intended tomb.
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8
The Sophora of the Parador Garden
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · approximately 200 years · Alhambra
Sophora japonica flowers late enough in the year to be useful: most ornamental trees in Granada's gardens finish blooming well before the height of summer, but this species holds its show for July and August, when its branches fill with hanging clusters of small white flowers, a genuine rarity in a Mediterranean garden calendar otherwise built around spring. Despite the name, the species is native to China rather than Japan, spread west along trade routes centuries before European botanists sorted out its origin, and this specimen has stood in the garden of what is now the Parador de Granada for close to two centuries, part of the same former Franciscan convent grounds that also hold the Parador's two flanking cypresses. Sharing a garden with cypresses planted for structure and pines for height, this sophora earns its place on scale and unusual timing alone, one of relatively few large deciduous flowering trees in a garden otherwise built around evergreens.
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9
The Horse Chestnuts of the Alhambra Forest
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · planted 16th-19th century, undated individually · Alhambra
The wooded hillside visitors climb to reach the Alhambra did not exist when the fortress was still in Muslim hands. Under the Nazarid rulers this slope was a cemetery, reportedly the burial ground of Muhammad I, the dynasty's founder, and his descendants, and the forest only began taking shape after Charles V arrived in the 16th century, later filled out under Ferdinand VII in the early 19th century with species including horse chestnut, plane, acacia and hackberry. The chestnuts have adapted well enough to compete for light against the forest's taller species that some individuals reach 20 metres, and each spring, generally late April into May, they put on the display that has made them the Bosque's best-known trees, dense white flower spikes covering the crown for a few weeks before giving way to spiny, inedible fruit that only superficially resembles a true chestnut. Unlike the paid monuments the forest surrounds, this walk itself, entered through the monumental Puerta de las Granadas, costs nothing and requires no ticket.
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