The Plane Tree of Hospital Pulido Valente

The national register puts this plane tree at 364 years old. If that is right, it was standing here before the hospital, before the road and before most of Lumiar. Treat the number carefully. It comes from the classification file opened in 1945 and has been repeated since, including in the book Árvores da Cidade, which gives the same 364 years and near-identical height and crown figures. Two sources, one origin, and nobody has ever dated the wood. Add the years since that survey and the register's own figure would make it about 375 today. What has actually been measured is impressive enough on its own: 5.85 metres round the trunk, 28 metres tall, and a crown 37 metres across, nine metres wider than the tree is high. It fills the forecourt of the Edifício D. Carlos at Hospital Pulido Valente, and the hospital holds its anniversary events underneath it. This is not a park. It is a working public hospital, and the tree stands in the open forecourt where you can see it without going near a clinical area, so go as you would go into someone's front garden and stay out of the way. The London plane is the tree Lisbon planted everywhere in the 19th century for shade. This one, if the file is right, was already old when that fashion started.