The Yew of Campo Santana

A European yew has no business growing here. The species belongs to damp northern churchyards and mountain shade, and Lisbon offers neither, yet this one has put on close to four metres of girth and fourteen metres of height on a hill above the Avenida. Portugal classified it in May 1968, which makes it one of the earliest protected trees in the city, and the national register now puts it a little past 130 years old. The ground under it has a harder history than the lawns suggest. This field held a slaughterhouse and then a bullring, and in 1817 the men condemned with Gomes Freire de Andrade were hanged on it, which is how Campo de Santana became Campo dos Mártires da Pátria. The garden came afterwards, laid out around a lake with exotic birds wandering the paths, and the medical school and the Hospital de São José still crowd its edges. At the top of the same field stands the statue of Sousa Martins, a physician who died in 1897, its plinth buried under marble plaques left by people who believe he still answers. Every part of a yew is poisonous except the red flesh around the seed.