The Aleppo Pine of Campo del Moro

This pine grows in the gardens spread beneath the Royal Palace's western facade, a formal landscape that took its current shape only in the 1890s even though the land had belonged to the crown for centuries before that, used variously as a hunting ground, a military exercise field and, briefly, a source of building stone. At 30 metres tall with a trunk 2.55 metres around, the pine ranks among six officially singular trees inside Campo del Moro's twenty hectares, sharing that status with a stone pine, an oak, a coast redwood and a pair of yews scattered through the same grounds. Aleppo pines are a Mediterranean basin native, drought tolerant and comfortable in Madrid's dry summers in a way many of the garden's more exotic imports are not, which may explain why this specimen has reached such size in only a century and a half, a fraction of the multi-century ages claimed for some of the city's other singular trees.