The Avocado of Ciudad de Jaen School

Malaga and neighbouring Granada now grow nine of every ten avocados sold in Spain, an industry whose roots trace back to Churriana, a district in the city's southwest better known today for hosting the airport than for starting a national crop. Early avocado trees reached this coastline in the mid-19th century, brought back by travellers with ties to Cuba and the Americas and planted first as curiosities on private estates rather than as a business. This tree, growing in the courtyard of a working primary school, is one of the survivors from that early period, tagged by the city in 2022 as one of ten singular trees and described in that designation as among the first avocado specimens brought to Malaga, more than 150 years old and still standing roughly 11 metres tall inside a low protective wall. The school's parents' association has taken its name directly from the tree, calling itself AMPA Aguacate, and generations of Churriana schoolchildren have grown up eating lunch in its shade decades before avocado became the crop that now defines the region's agriculture. It is not freely open to the public: visiting means contacting the school directly and arranging a time, an honest limitation for a tree that otherwise has one of the best stories on this list.