The Paineira of Rua dos Jerónimos

One of Lisbon's most walked tourist streets has a South American giant standing on it and almost nobody looks up. The paineira on Rua dos Jerónimos stands two minutes from the monastery that fills every postcard of the city, and it holds its own: 4.2 metres round the trunk, 24 metres tall, with a crown spreading 22 metres when the state last measured it in 2015. Portugal classified it as a tree of public interest in December 2001, the protection reserved for individual specimens worth keeping. Ceiba crispiflora comes from the forests of southern Brazil and does not hide where it is from. The trunk swells into a bottle shape and carries blunt conical thorns, and it flowers pink before splitting open pods packed with a silky white floss, the stuff that once filled pillows and life jackets. By the register's own reckoning it went in around 1930, which makes it younger than most trees on this map and no less worth the detour. It is the sort of tree you walk past twice: once without seeing it, and once when somebody points at the thorns.