The Tall Cedar of the Avenida del Peru

At 33 metres this is the tallest tree on the Retiro's catalogued list, and it does not look it, because it stands at a junction of wide avenues where nothing nearby gives the eye anything to measure against. Walk up to the trunk, 3.3 metres around, and the height arrives all at once. It is a Cedar of Lebanon of about 120 years, at the meeting of the Avenida del Peru and the Plaza de Guatemala in the park's north-east, a few paces from the equestrian monument to General Martinez Campos. That statue was unveiled in 1907, when the cedar was already a young tree of perhaps twenty, watching masons set the plinth. Lebanon cedars grow through three clearly different shapes. Young ones are narrow cones, middle-aged ones broaden, and only the old ones flatten into the tiered, table-topped silhouette that ended up on the Lebanese flag. This one is midway through the second stage, still conical at the top and already spreading below. Its crown spans 11 metres against the 22 of the older cedar down at the Prado. The two of them, twenty minutes apart on foot, are the same species caught at two points in a life that can run past a thousand years.