El Sabino de San Juan

Eighteen and a half metres around. That is the circumference the city's environment department recorded for this ahuehuete when it wrote the tree into the new register of heritage trees in 2025, and it makes El Sabino the thickest of the twelve trees Mexico City has so far declared. Local tradition, set down by the chronicler Rodolfo Cordero Lopez, holds that Cuauhtemoc planted it in 1521 in thanks to the Xochimilca people. Nobody has ever tested that. No ring count or growth study has been published, so the round 500 years is a story the barrio tells rather than a number anyone has measured. What is documented is harder to read. In September 2018 the tree broke apart in high winds, a year after specialists from the Universidad de Chapingo had warned that it was not being properly maintained. What stands in the plazuela today is the surviving part, recorded at 24.5 metres tall and formally protected seven years after that night. The city has form here. El Sargento, the giant ahuehuete of Chapultepec that generations of Mexicans were taken to see, dried out in 1969 and is a relic now. This one is not. It stands in a small plaza in Barrio San Juan with the neighbourhood around it, which is roughly how it has survived everything else.