El Barrilito

Everyone in Malaga who has walked past this tree calls it by its nickname rather than its species: El Barrilito, the little barrel, for a trunk so swollen it looks less like wood than like something inflated. Ceiba chodatii stores water in that trunk to survive its native South American dry season, and this specimen has taken the adaptation further than most, measured in April 2022 at 5.86 metres around at chest height, a girth that local tree enthusiasts consider possibly the thickest of its kind anywhere in Spain or continental Europe, a claim no national register has settled outright. It grows in the Jardines de Alfonso Canales, a small formal garden between Calle Vendeja and Plaza de la Marina named for the Malaga-born poet, where a bronze bust of Canales was installed beside the tree in 2007. For a period the tree stood behind a protective fence, removed in 2009, and it now shares its plaza with a set of bright red benches from a public art project, an odd but fitting pairing for a tree whose entire appeal is how strange it looks. In 2022 the city tagged it as one of ten singular trees under a European urban-tree awareness campaign, one of five on this list to carry that same designation.