The Cedar of Lebanon at the Prado

Nobody agrees how old this cedar is, and the gap is a century. The regional catalogue and the city's tree literature give roughly 120 years. The guides to the Paseo del Prado put it at 232, which would date the planting to within a generation of Juan de Villanueva's museum building. A third account, more plausible than either, ties it to 1871, when the garden on the museum's western slope was laid out around the Velazquez statue. What is not in dispute is the shape: 26 metres tall, a crown 22 metres across and a trunk four and a half metres around, so the tree is nearly as wide as it is high, its upper branches held out in the flat horizontal plates that only old Lebanon cedars make. It stands a few steps from the museum's busiest door, and most of the several million people who pass it every year are looking at the queue. Cedrus libani is the tree of the Phoenician fleets and of Solomon's temple, reduced in its Lebanese homeland to a handful of protected groves. Madrid keeps one on the Paseo del Prado, inside the stretch of city that UNESCO inscribed in 2021.