The Ahuehuete of the Parterre

This tree carries two stories about its own birth that cannot both be true. The popular version, repeated in guidebooks and on the sign at its base, says it was planted in 1633 when the Count-Duke of Olivares opened the grounds that became Retiro Park, which would make it nearly 400 years old and Madrid's unrivalled oldest tree. Madrid's own municipal arborists are skeptical. The Parterre garden around it was completely replanted in 1714, and some specialists place the tree's actual origin after 1814, closer to two centuries old rather than four. Called Ahuehuete, from the Nahuatl for old man of the water, or simply El Abuelo, the grandfather, it is a Montezuma cypress, a species native to Mexican wetlands where individual specimens are known to live for millennia and reach trunk diameters wider than a house. In arid, landlocked Madrid it has thrived regardless of which age is correct, its buttressed trunk and feathery foliage looking more at home beside a Mexican river than beside a formal Spanish parterre.