Ahuehuete de Parque Espana

This tree has a birthday, which on this page is rare. It went into the ground on 21 September 1921, the day Parque Espana was inaugurated for the centenary of Mexican independence, and it has been growing in the same spot in Roma Norte ever since. Almost every other protected tree in Mexico City is dated by legend, by estimate or not at all. This one has a date somebody wrote down. A century of city has happened around it. The Roma was still a young neighbourhood of new houses when the park opened; the 1985 earthquake brought several of them down within a few streets of here; the district emptied and refilled and became the part of town everyone now has an opinion about. The ahuehuete has been the constant. When Excelsior went to the park for its hundredth birthday in 2021, the tree was described as full of life and among the tallest standing there. The city's own measurements make it 28 metres tall with a trunk just over 5 metres around, which for a tree with a documented start is a useful reference point: this is what a century of growth looks like in this soil, in a species whose older relatives elsewhere in the city run to three and four times that girth.