Madrid's most remarkable trees are almost all immigrants, brought in by royal gardeners testing whether foreign species could survive freezing winters and scorching, dry summers. A Mexican swamp cypress has outlasted every native tree in the city's most famous park. A Himalayan cedar, an Atlas Mountains cedar, and a Caucasus elm all found the Madrid plateau survivable enough to grow for centuries. Even the city's oldest documented holm oak, one of the few genuinely native species here, grows wild in what was once a royal hunting ground. Spain's Regional Catalogue of Singular Trees protects every one of them.
0 / 17 bezocht in Madrid
1
The Ahuehuete of the Parterre
Montezuma Cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) · 200-390 years (age genuinely disputed between sources) · Retiro
This tree carries two stories about its own birth that cannot both be true. The popular version, repeated in guidebooks and on the sign at its base, says it was planted in 1633 when the Count-Duke of Olivares opened the grounds that became Retiro Park, which would make it nearly 400 years old and Madrid's unrivalled oldest tree. Madrid's own municipal arborists are skeptical: the Parterre garden around it was completely replanted in 1714, and some specialists place the tree's actual origin after 1814, closer to two centuries old rather than four. Called Ahuehuete, from the Nahuatl for old man of the water, or simply El Abuelo, the grandfather, it is a Montezuma cypress, a species native to Mexican wetlands where individual specimens are known to live for millennia and reach trunk diameters wider than a house. In arid, landlocked Madrid it has thrived regardless of which age is correct, its buttressed trunk and feathery foliage looking more at home beside a Mexican river than beside a formal Spanish parterre.
Lees meer en route →
2
The Himalayan Cedar of the Crystal Palace
Himalayan Cedar (Cedrus deodara) · about 150 years · Retiro
This cedar stands directly in front of the pond at the Palacio de Cristal, a 19th century glass and iron pavilion built in 1887 to exhibit plants and animals brought back from the Philippines, and it has spent most of the pavilion's history as part of the same postcard view: the glass palace reflected in the water, framed by the cedar's dark, tiered branches. Deodar cedars come from the western Himalayas, where the name deodar derives from a Sanskrit phrase meaning timber of the gods, and the species reached European ornamental gardens in the early 19th century as one of many exotic conifers collectors raced to introduce. Madrid's climate, hot and dry in summer rather than the Himalayan cedar's native monsoon-fed mountains, has suited this specimen well enough that it now ranks among Retiro's six officially singular trees, protected under the same regional catalogue as its more famous neighbour, the disputed-age Ahuehuete a short walk away.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: Juan Cruzado Cortés (CC BY)
3
The Three-Trunked Yew of the Velazquez Palace
European Yew (Taxus baccata) · over 150 years · Retiro
Rather than one trunk, this yew splits into three, each thick enough to measure separately: 142, 120 and 140 centimetres around, fused into a single crown 18 metres wide standing beside the eastern wall of the Palacio de Velazquez, a red-brick exhibition hall built in 1883. European yews are famously slow growing and long lived, capable of reaching ages in the thousands of years in the right conditions, and famously toxic in almost every part except the flesh around the seed, a combination that has made the species a fixture of European churchyards for centuries, planted as much for its poison as its evergreen symbolism. At only 12 metres tall despite its age, this specimen shows the yew's characteristic patience: slow vertical growth traded for density and longevity. A wooden fence now rings the tree for its protection, a modest concession for one of only six trees in the whole of Retiro Park to hold official singular tree status from the Community of Madrid.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4
The Bald Cypresses of the Crystal Palace Pond
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · about 108 years · Retiro
Several bald cypresses grow directly out of the pond in front of the Palacio de Cristal, their trunks and lower roots permanently submerged, a planting scheme that only works because this particular conifer, unlike almost every other cone-bearing tree, tolerates and even prefers standing water. Bald cypresses develop distinctive above-water root growths called pneumatophores, sometimes called cypress knees, that let the roots breathe oxygen the flooded soil cannot supply, an adaptation evolved in the swamps of the southeastern United States rather than anywhere near Madrid. Planted around 1918, roughly three decades after the glass pavilion itself went up in 1887, the grove has grown into one of the more unusual sights in a park otherwise dominated by conventional planting: full-grown conifers standing calf-deep in a reflecting pool, doubling their own image in the water they grow from. One specimen among the group carries the Community of Madrid's singular tree designation, protecting a planting choice that was, by the standards of 1918 Spanish gardening, a genuine experiment.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5
The Cypress of the Royal Botanic Garden
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · about 250 years · Retiro, near the Prado
This cypress has stood on the Plano de la Flor terrace since before the Royal Botanic Garden moved to its current site. King Carlos III relocated the garden here in 1781, transplanting an existing scientific collection to sit beside his new Prado promenade, and this cypress, already growing or planted around that time, has outlasted every institutional change since: French occupation during the Peninsular War, a 19th century closure and near-abandonment, and a 20th century restoration that returned the garden to something close to its original Enlightenment-era design. At 32 metres it is both the oldest and the tallest tree in a garden that exists specifically to hold record specimens, and its trunk, a metre and a half across, has grown thick enough that the tree is now folded into the Paisaje de la Luz, Landscape of Light, the cultural corridor linking the Prado, the botanic garden and the Retiro that UNESCO named a World Heritage Site in 2021.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
6
The Caucasian Elm of the Botanic Garden
Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia) · about 200 years · Retiro, near the Prado
Nobody can agree how tall this tree is. It reaches over 30 metres in the garden's north zone along the Paseo de Mutis, and garden staff and visiting botanists put the exact figure several metres apart depending on the method, which is the ordinary fate of a tree measured from the ground by eye rather than climbed with a tape. The species itself, Zelkova carpinifolia, comes from mountain forests spanning Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran, and only reached European gardens in the 18th century, part of the same wave of scientific plant collecting that filled Madrid's garden with foreign specimens under royal sponsorship. It is a relative of the elms without being one, which is how it has come through a century of Dutch elm disease that emptied streets across Europe of the real thing. This particular tree is roughly two centuries old, which for a species this fast-growing means it reached close to its full height early and has held it ever since. It carries singular tree designation number 260 in the Community of Madrid's regional catalogue, one number among 280 protected specimens across the wider region.
Lees meer en route →
7
The Holm Oak of the Trillo Roundabout
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · about 300 years · Casa de Campo
Roads converge on this tree rather than around it. The Glorieta del Trillo, where the Carretera de Somosaguas, the Paseo de los Castanos and the Camino de Rodajos all meet inside Casa de Campo, is named for the holm oak growing at its centre, a roughly 300 year old specimen with a crown 18.5 metres across and a trunk 4.6 metres around. Casa de Campo itself was a royal hunting estate from the 16th century until 1931, when the Second Republic opened it to the public, which means this oak spent roughly two centuries of its life on private land reserved for the Spanish crown's deer and boar hunts rather than growing in anything resembling a public park. Holm oaks are Iberia's signature evergreen, slow growing and built to survive exactly the hot, dry summers and cold winters Madrid delivers, and this one has outlasted the hunting estate, the monarchy that owned it, and the Republic that opened the gates, still marking the same road junction today.
Lees meer en route →
8
The Aleppo Pine of Campo del Moro
Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) · about 150 years · Campo del Moro
This pine grows in the gardens spread beneath the Royal Palace's western facade, a formal landscape that took its current shape only in the 1890s even though the land had belonged to the crown for centuries before that, used variously as a hunting ground, a military exercise field and, briefly, a source of building stone. At 30 metres tall with a trunk 2.55 metres around, the pine ranks among six officially singular trees inside Campo del Moro's twenty hectares, sharing that status with a stone pine, an oak, a coast redwood and a pair of yews scattered through the same grounds. Aleppo pines are a Mediterranean basin native, drought tolerant and comfortable in Madrid's dry summers in a way many of the garden's more exotic imports are not, which may explain why this specimen has reached such size in only a century and a half, a fraction of the multi-century ages claimed for some of the city's other singular trees.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: Luis Fernandez Garcia (CC BY 3.0)
9
The Grandfather Cedar of Parque del Oeste
Atlas Cedar (Cedrus atlantica) · over 150 years (precise age not confirmed) · Moncloa-Aravaca
Known locally as El Abuelo, the grandfather, this Atlas cedar grows near the Fuente de la Salud and the artificial stream that cuts through the northern part of Parque del Oeste, a park built on former rubbish dumps and quarry land at the turn of the 20th century and rebuilt again after Civil War fighting damaged it in the 1930s. Atlas cedars are native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria and reached European gardens as an ornamental import around 1840, which sets an outer limit on how old any specimen in Madrid could plausibly be; the species itself is capable of living centuries, some specialists say close to a thousand years under ideal conditions, though this individual tree's precise age has not been established by any source found. What is established is its status: one of the Community of Madrid's officially catalogued singular trees, numbered and registered like the 279 other specimens across the region, marking it as protected regardless of whether its exact birth year is ever pinned down.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: Cenaida (CC BY 4.0)
10
The Stone Pine of the Priest's House
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · about 230 years · Barajas
This stone pine grows half hidden among shrubs near a small hermitage called the Casa del Cura, the priest's house, in a park built for a duchess rather than a king. Maria Josefa Pimentel, Duchess of Osuna, commissioned El Capricho in 1784, hiring French landscape designers Jean-Baptiste Mulot and Pierre Provost to lay out French, English and Italian style gardens across fourteen hectares in what was then open countryside east of Madrid, now the Barajas district near the airport that shares its name. The pine likely dates from that same late 18th century construction period, making it a contemporary of the duchess's original vision rather than a later addition. Unlike Madrid's grander royal gardens, El Capricho suffered decades of neglect and, during the Spanish Civil War, served as a military command post, before the city restored it and reopened it to visitors in the 1990s. The pine survived all of it, one of the park's few catalogued singular trees and among the oldest living witnesses to the duchess's original 18th century design.
Lees meer en route →
11
The Strawberry Tree of the Plaza de la Lealtad
Strawberry Tree (Arbutus unedo) · over 100 years · Paseo del Prado
Madrid's coat of arms shows a bear reaching up into a strawberry tree, and this is the closest thing the city has to the original. It stands in the southern corner of the Plaza de la Lealtad, opposite the Ritz, propped on iron crutches installed when its own limbs grew heavy enough to threaten pulling it over. Strawberry trees are usually shrubs, three or four metres of Mediterranean scrub. This one has been allowed to grow into an actual tree for more than a century, which is why the props are needed at all. It is also why the Comunidad de Madrid added it to the singular-tree catalogue in 2015 for cultural rather than botanical significance: the emblem, made real. Historians are fairly sure the heraldic tree of 1222 was never a madrono in the first place and that the bear on the crest was reaching for something else entirely, but the city has committed. The fruit is the payoff. Through November and December it carries white bell flowers and the previous year's fruit at the same time, red warty spheres that look like lychees and taste of very little. The Latin unedo means eat only one.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
12
The Cedar of Lebanon at the Prado
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · 120-235 years (sources disagree) · Paseo del Prado
Nobody agrees how old this cedar is, and the gap is a century. The regional catalogue and the city's tree literature give roughly 120 years. The guides to the Paseo del Prado put it at 232, which would date the planting to within a generation of Juan de Villanueva's museum building. A third account, more plausible than either, ties it to 1871, when the garden on the museum's western slope was laid out around the Velazquez statue. What is not in dispute is the shape: 26 metres tall, a crown 22 metres across and a trunk four and a half metres around, so the tree is nearly as wide as it is high, its upper branches held out in the flat horizontal plates that only old Lebanon cedars make. It stands a few steps from the museum's busiest door, and most of the several million people who pass it every year are looking at the queue. Cedrus libani is the tree of the Phoenician fleets and of Solomon's temple, reduced in its Lebanese homeland to a handful of protected groves. Madrid keeps one on the Paseo del Prado, inside the stretch of city that UNESCO inscribed in 2021.
Lees meer en route →
13
The Hackberry of the Plaza de Murillo
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · about 140 years · Paseo del Prado
The Plaza de Murillo, the small formal square between the Prado's south door and the gate of the Royal Botanic Garden, holds four catalogued conifers and one broadleaf that outgrew every one of them. This hackberry stands 25 metres tall, close to the recorded ceiling for the species, and is about 140 years old, which puts its planting in the decade the square took its present shape. Celtis australis is the almez, a southern European tree with a smooth grey trunk that looks poured rather than grown, and fruit the size of a pea that turns from orange to near black. Spanish villages once coppiced it for the handles of hayforks, because the young wood bends a long way before it snaps, and whole valleys in Aragon lived off that trade. It is also, unglamorously, one of the toughest street trees in existence, indifferent to drought, wind and exhaust, which is exactly why a specimen this size is still standing on an island of pavement in central Madrid. Look for its flowers in April and you will not find them; they are green and smaller than a grain of rice. Stand under it in July, when the stone outside the Prado is at forty degrees, and the reason the square was planted this way needs no explaining.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
14
The Himalayan Spruce of the Plaza de Murillo
Morinda Spruce (Picea smithiana) · 140-235 years (sources disagree) · Paseo del Prado
Of the four conifers catalogued in the Plaza de Murillo, this is the one nobody can name. Picea smithiana grows wild between two and nearly four thousand metres up, in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Nepal and Tibet, and reached Europe in 1818 when seed arrived in Scotland. It has the longest needles of any spruce and the most extreme weeping habit in the genus: the side branches hang almost vertically off the limbs, so a mature tree looks like it is slowly melting. This one is 22 metres tall with a trunk 1.85 metres around. Its age is honestly unsettled. The city's guides say 140 years; the botanical account attached to the square claims a planting around 1790, which would make it older than the Botanic Garden's present layout and older than nearly anything else rooted along the Paseo del Prado. The species honours Sir James Edward Smith, who founded the Linnean Society and bought Linnaeus's entire collection at twenty-four. Its other name, morinda, is a Himalayan word for flower honey and refers to the resin that beads on the young cones. A high-altitude spruce is the wrong tree for a Madrid summer by every measure that matters, which is what makes it worth standing under.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: EnriqueSN (CC BY-SA 4.0)
15
The Four-Trunked Silver Maple of Cecilio Rodriguez
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · over 100 years · Retiro
This maple gave up on having one trunk early. It divides at about head height into four main stems, each carrying its share of a crown 15 metres across and 20 metres tall, a form silver maples fall into readily and gardeners usually correct. Nobody corrected this one. It stands inside the Jardines de Cecilio Rodriguez, the walled Andalusian-style garden in the south-east corner of the Retiro, laid out in the 1940s on ground first set aside in 1929 for an extension to the park's zoo. The peacocks that patrol the hedges are what came of that plan instead. Acer saccharinum is North American, a tree of the river bottoms of the eastern United States, and it takes its name from the underside of the leaf rather than from sap: turn one over and it is pale silver white, so a breeze through the crown changes the colour of the entire tree at once. It flowers before it leafs, in tight red clusters in late February, weeks before anything else in the park has woken up. The garden shuts at dusk and is one of the quietest corners of the Retiro, which for a park this busy is worth knowing about.
Lees meer en route →
Foto: Garuskas (CC BY-SA 4.0)
16
The Tall Cedar of the Avenida del Peru
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · about 120 years · Retiro
At 33 metres this is the tallest tree on the Retiro's catalogued list, and it does not look it, because it stands at a junction of wide avenues where nothing nearby gives the eye anything to measure against. Walk up to the trunk, 3.3 metres around, and the height arrives all at once. It is a Cedar of Lebanon of about 120 years, at the meeting of the Avenida del Peru and the Plaza de Guatemala in the park's north-east, a few paces from the equestrian monument to General Martinez Campos. That statue was unveiled in 1907, when the cedar was already a young tree of perhaps twenty, watching masons set the plinth. Lebanon cedars grow through three clearly different shapes. Young ones are narrow cones, middle-aged ones broaden, and only the old ones flatten into the tiered, table-topped silhouette that ended up on the Lebanese flag. This one is midway through the second stage, still conical at the top and already spreading below. Its crown spans 11 metres against the 22 of the older cedar down at the Prado. The two of them, twenty minutes apart on foot, are the same species caught at two points in a life that can run past a thousand years.
Lees meer en route →
17
The Blue Gum North of the Estanque
Tasmanian Blue Gum (Eucalyptus globulus) · over 100 years · Retiro
In February 2015 the Comunidad de Madrid revised its register of singular trees and published two lists side by side. One added 69 trees. The other struck 43 off, for the blunt reason that they were dead or gone, and among them was the Eucalipto del Parque del Retiro. On the same page, a different eucalyptus a few hundred metres away was written into the catalogue in its place, listed for historical significance. This is the replacement. It stands north of the Estanque Grande, near the Paseo de Coches, over 20 metres tall with a crown about as wide and a trunk you cannot get your arms halfway round. Eucalyptus globulus is Tasmanian, brought to Spain in the 1860s on the theory that it drained marshes and drove off malaria, and planted so enthusiastically across the north-west that it has become a management problem there. In a Madrid park it is simply a giant, its bark peeling away in long ribbons and its leaves smelling of a cough sweet when you crush one. The trunk carries a century of carved initials, which is why the tree writers who have followed it since the 2000s keep asking the park for a sign and a low rail.
Lees meer en route →