The Stone Pine of the Priest's House

This stone pine grows half hidden among shrubs near a small hermitage called the Casa del Cura, the priest's house, in a park built for a duchess rather than a king. Maria Josefa Pimentel, Duchess of Osuna, commissioned El Capricho in 1784, hiring French landscape designers Jean-Baptiste Mulot and Pierre Provost to lay out French, English and Italian style gardens across fourteen hectares in what was then open countryside east of Madrid, now the Barajas district near the airport that shares its name. The pine likely dates from that same late 18th century construction period, making it a contemporary of the duchess's original vision rather than a later addition. Unlike Madrid's grander royal gardens, El Capricho suffered decades of neglect and, during the Spanish Civil War, served as a military command post, before the city restored it and reopened it to visitors in the 1990s. The pine survived all of it, one of the park's few catalogued singular trees and among the oldest living witnesses to the duchess's original 18th century design.