The Floss Silk Tree of Cortina del Muelle

This tree survived a construction project by becoming part of the construction. When the streets around Malaga Cathedral were remodelled roughly a decade ago, most of what stood in the way came out. This Ceiba speciosa, a South American species closely related to the Barrilito across town but distinguished by its spinier bark and paler, pink-tinged flowers, did not: engineers built an elevated planter bed around its base instead, integrating a 23-metre tree into the finished streetscape rather than removing it. The result is a strange piece of urban furniture, a raised stone ring on a historic pedestrian street with a substantial tropical tree growing straight out of the middle of it, steps from the cathedral that gives Cortina del Muelle its foot traffic. Malaga tagged it in 2022 as one of ten singular trees under the city's TreeTags scheme, citing its height and its unusually deliberate preservation as the reasons for the designation. No individual age or planting date survives for this specimen, honestly left as an estimate rather than guessed.