The Tipuana of Praça São João Bosco

A tree with a thirty four metre crown grows in the middle of a traffic circle, and by 2018 that crown had become the problem. City arborists and technicians from Portugal's nature institute came out that March to relieve the load: selective limb removal, canopy thinning, cuts meant to let wind pass through rather than push against it, the kind of surgery a tree this size needs to keep standing over a road. The garden that holds it, seven thousand square metres wrapped around a statue of Don Bosco raised in 1988, forms the roundabout that carries traffic between Campo de Ourique and the Prazeres district, directly across from Lisbon's second largest cemetery. The national register measured the tipu's trunk at 100 years old back in 2010, putting it past its first century now, a South American import from the subtropical lowlands of Bolivia and Argentina. It earned legal protection as a tree of public interest in January 2019, one of a few dozen trees in Lisbon to hold that status. Its trunk runs 3.4 metres round, modest next to the spread it throws overhead. Late spring dusts the roundabout's lawns orange when it flowers. Cars circle it a thousand times a day; almost none of the drivers know what they are driving around.