The Grandfather Cedar of Parque del Oeste

Known locally as El Abuelo, the grandfather, this Atlas cedar grows near the Fuente de la Salud and the artificial stream that cuts through the northern part of Parque del Oeste, a park built on former rubbish dumps and quarry land at the turn of the 20th century and rebuilt again after Civil War fighting damaged it in the 1930s. Atlas cedars are native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria and reached European gardens as an ornamental import around 1840, which sets an outer limit on how old any specimen in Madrid could plausibly be; the species itself is capable of living centuries, some specialists say close to a thousand years under ideal conditions, though this individual tree's precise age has not been established by any source found. What is established is its status as one of the Community of Madrid's officially catalogued singular trees, numbered and registered like the 279 other specimens across the region, which marks it as protected regardless of whether its exact birth year is ever pinned down.