Seville's grandest trees are mostly not ancient at all. They are the product of two specific bursts of civic ambition: centuries of orange trees planted for scent rather than fruit in Andalusi and Christian gardens alike, and a wave of botanical experimentation around the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition that filled Parque de María Luisa with Australian figs, American eucalyptus and Asian ginkgos never native to this soil. A handful of trees here predate all of that. Most are free to see, and the ones that aren't are inside places worth the ticket anyway.
0 / 43 bezocht in Seville
Foto: Juan carlos boza (CC BY-SA 3.0)
1
The Ginkgo Grove of the Real Alcázar
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · 116 years · Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo
Ten of these ginkgos are Seville survivors from a delivery of twenty-five. The trees arrived at the Real Alcázar in the autumn and winter of 1910, part of a shipment from the Royal Site of La Granja de San Ildefonso near Segovia, sent south to plant the palace's new English Garden, a cooler, shadier counterpoint to the clipped Andalusi courtyards elsewhere in the grounds. Fifteen didn't survive more than a century of Seville's dry heat, a climate ginkgos tolerate poorly compared to the temperate gardens they came from. The ten that did are now among the oldest ginkgos in Andalusia, and every December and January they do something nothing else in the garden does: every leaf turns the same intense yellow within days of each other, a uniform gold that stands out hard against the evergreen palms, cypresses and citrus around it. The species survived in the wild only in a few restricted pockets of China, kept alive for centuries as a sacred tree in Chinese and Japanese temple gardens before European botanists began exporting it in the 18th century. Its old Chinese name means duck's foot, a reference to the fan-shaped leaf that later inspired Goethe to write an entire poem about the tree's paired, seemingly single lobes. The Alcázar's ginkgos arrived almost a century after Goethe wrote it, foreign transplants in a garden that was already centuries old by the time they showed up.
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Foto: Anual (CC BY 3.0)
2
The Ombú of La Cartuja
Ombu (Phytolacca dioica) · 500 years · Isla de la Cartuja
This ombú, a soft-wooded relative of spinach that grows to the size of an oak, is said to have come from seeds Hernando Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, brought back from South America and planted in his own private arboretum around 1529. After his death the seeds, or the seedling itself, passed to the Carthusian monks next door, and the tree has stood at the Monasterio de la Cartuja ever since, possibly the first ombú ever grown in Europe. It nearly didn't survive the twentieth century. In the early 1990s, restorers tried to seal cavities in its soft trunk with polyurethane foam, a technique meant for harder wood that instead trapped moisture and fed the fungus already eating the tree from inside. Expo '92 technicians removed the foam before it could finish the job, but the extraction itself caused more damage, and the tree has been left deliberately untouched since. Its wood is famously soft, closer to a swollen vegetable than timber, which is why arborists now recommend a fence and a no-walking perimeter rather than any further intervention. The monastery today houses Andalusia's contemporary art museum, so a tree that may have crossed the Atlantic in a conquistador's son's luggage now shares its courtyard with rotating exhibitions of modern sculpture.
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3
The Figs of Plaza del Cristo de Burgos
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · 100 years · San Vicente, Casco Antiguo
Four of Seville's biggest fig trees didn't start out on this plaza at all. City gardeners moved these Moreton Bay figs here from Parque de María Luisa around 1925, an unusually bold transplant for trees of this size, and they took root well enough that the biggest now measures 7.2 metres around and 28 metres tall. The species, native to the coastal forests of eastern Australia, is known for the buttressed, almost architectural roots it grows to stabilize such a heavy crown, and for aerial roots that descend from its branches and thicken into secondary trunks over time. Every one of the four gets pruned back hard each spring, not for the trees' health but for Easter: Semana Santa's processions route directly through this plaza, and the candle-bearing floats need branches out of the way. The square itself has changed names more often than the trees have changed address, known at various points as Plaza de Argüelles, Plaza Virgen del Pilar and Plaza de San Pedro before settling on its current name, and locals called it the Plaza de las Magnolias for years even though the ficus, not the magnolias, dominate the space today. All four are individually protected on Seville's own register of singular trees, a rare case of a whole relocated group qualifying together rather than one specimen alone.
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Foto: CarlosVdeHabsburgo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4
The Cypress of the Glorieta de Bécquer
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · 160 years · Parque de María Luisa
Seville built a monument to its most famous Romantic poet around a tree that had nothing to do with him. The bald cypress at the centre of the Glorieta de Bécquer was already standing, planted sometime between 1850 and 1870, when the city commissioned sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera to surround it with white marble and bronze figures representing three stages of love, a monument inaugurated in 1911, decades before Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's poetry made this corner of Parque de María Luisa a literary pilgrimage site. The tree itself, native to the swamps of the Mississippi basin, is a curious choice for a Mediterranean city: it needs no flooding to thrive, but it does drop its needles every winter like a broadleaf tree, a trait most conifers don't share. At around 150 to 175 years old, with a trunk 5.82 metres round and a crown reaching 33 metres, it now frames whichever restoration the poet's monument currently needs, which has been more than once. Photographers queue for the same shot from the same bench angle nearly every day of the year. Almost none of them come for the tree.
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5
El Gran Capitán
River Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) · 100 years · Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo
Seville's tallest tree is also one of its least visited, despite standing in the middle of the historic centre. This river red gum, known locally as El Gran Capitán, rises more than 50 metres above the Paseo de Catalina de Ribera at the edge of Jardines de Murillo, a five minute walk from the Real Alcázar's own walls, yet it rarely appears in a single guidebook or walking tour. Its trunk has grown close to five metres around, and in 2025 the city carried out a precision pruning operation specifically to reduce the risk of falling limbs, treating a tree this size with the same caution as a structural repair. Eucalyptus camaldulensis is native to Australian riverbanks, not Andalusian gardens, and it owes its presence here to the same wave of botanical experimentation that filled Parque de María Luisa nearby with Australian figs: gardeners in the early twentieth century testing which imports would thrive in Seville's dry heat. This one thrived almost too well, outgrowing every other tree in the city by a wide margin while somehow staying anonymous. Locals who live nearby walk past it daily without a second look. Visitors headed for the more famous gardens on either side, the Alcázar and the cathedral, pass directly underneath it and rarely notice they've done so.
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6
The Centennial Hackberries of María Luisa
Mediterranean Hackberry (Celtis australis) · 100+ years · Parque de María Luisa
Not every tree on this list needed royal patronage or a foreign pedigree to earn its place. The Mediterranean hackberries scattered through Parque de María Luisa, clustered most densely near the Glorieta Rafael de León, the Choza de los Carneros and the Paseo de los Rosales, are a native Iberian species that grew in this soil for generations before any garden was landscaped around it. Several specimens here are recognized as centennial by the city's own singular-trees inventory, prized less for any single record than for the deep, textured shade their slow canopies provide across the park's oldest paths. The species is tough and long-lived, tolerant of drought, poor soil and hard pruning, which is exactly why Seville's gardeners let so many of them stand while faster, showier imports like the park's Australian figs and eucalyptus got the attention. Parque de María Luisa itself was the private garden of the Palacio de San Telmo before Princess María Luisa Fernanda donated part of it to the city in 1893, decades before landscape architect Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier redesigned it for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition. These hackberries predate that transformation. They were already old when the glorietas, fountains and pavilions went up around them, quiet holdovers from what the land looked like before it became a park at all.
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Foto: Gzzz (CC BY-SA 3.0)
7
The Trees of the Alameda de Hércules
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · 100 years · San Vicente, Casco Antiguo
Seville's oldest public promenade was built on a swamp, and it takes its name from the trees planted to drain it. The Alameda de Hércules, laid out in 1574 on marshy ground just north of the old city walls, is named for the white poplars, álamos in Spanish, planted to help dry and stabilize the reclaimed land, trees used as infrastructure rather than ornament. Poplars still line the central walkway today, though the ones standing now trace only to a major 1764 replanting that added more than 1,600 trees, not to the original 16th-century planting. At both ends of the promenade stand dense stands of London planes, nearly a century old themselves, that have survived every renovation the square has undergone since, including a long twentieth-century decline and its more recent revival as one of Seville's most popular nightlife streets. Two Roman columns, salvaged from a demolished temple, still stand at the promenade's southern entrance, predating every tree here by more than a millennium and giving the Alameda its Hercules name through a 17th-century statue once mounted on top of one of them. Bars and terraces now crowd the same ground the poplars were planted to drain, four and a half centuries after the swamp they replaced.
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Foto: Roberto Chamoso G (CC BY-SA 3.0 ES)
8
The Orange Trees of the Patio de los Naranjos
Bitter Orange (Citrus aurantium) · 100 years or less · Casco Antiguo
The orange trees that give Seville Cathedral's most famous courtyard its name aren't nearly as old as the courtyard itself. The Patio de los Naranjos, a rectangular yard 43 by 81 metres, was built between 1172 and 1186 as the ablutions courtyard of the Almohad mosque that once stood on this site, the place worshippers washed before prayer. The mosque came down after the 1248 Christian conquest and the Gothic cathedral rose around the same footprint, but the orange trees visitors photograph today only date to a 20th-century restoration led by architect Félix Hernández, replacing whatever grew here before rather than surviving from it. What has survived intact is more remarkable than any tree: the mosque's minaret, spared demolition entirely, still stands beside the patio as the cathedral's bell tower, known today as the Giralda, and a fountain basin at the courtyard's centre, possibly Roman or Visigothic in origin, still occupies the same spot where the ablutions fountain once stood. For most of its eight centuries this courtyard cost nothing to enter. That changed in 1992, when the cathedral folded it into its paid tourist route, ending a run of open public access longer than most European countries have existed. The orange trees are new. The habit of walking through them for free is the part that's actually gone.
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Foto: CarlosVdeHabsburgo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
9
The Fig of the Glorieta de Goya
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · 100 years · Parque de María Luisa
Two marble columns are the only physical trace left of the pavilion this fig tree now grows inside. The Glorieta de Goya, a circular clearing in Parque de María Luisa near Plaza de España, once held a full-scale replica of the Quinta del Sordo, Francisco de Goya's house outside Madrid, built for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition and dismantled once the fair closed. Only two four-metre Doric columns from that pavilion's entrance survived the teardown, and they now frame a Moreton Bay fig planted in the same period, introduced to Seville in the early 20th century and naturalized well enough in the local climate that Ficus macrophylla now shows up across the city's parks and plazas. The tree has grown into the columns' role as much as around them, its crown now the dominant feature of a clearing designed to showcase a painter's house rather than a fig tree. Later redesigns in the second half of the twentieth century reshaped the glorieta's paths and plantings more than once, but the columns and the fig both survived every version. Visitors walking the park's central axis between Plaza de España and the fountain gardens pass directly beneath it, often without registering that the shade they're standing in used to be somebody's front garden reconstruction.
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10
The Camphor Tree of the Glorieta de Doña Sol
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · unknown · Parque de María Luisa
As far as one dedicated local record can tell, this camphor tree has no rivals anywhere in Seville. It stands in the Glorieta de Doña Sol, a quiet clearing in Parque de María Luisa, described as the only confirmed Cinnamomum camphora growing in the city, a species more commonly associated with temple courtyards in Japan and southern China, where individual specimens are known to live well past a thousand years. No planting record has surfaced for this particular tree, and no formal age estimate exists yet, since it was only proposed for Seville's singular-trees catalogue in 2016. What sets it apart is entirely botanical rather than historical: camphor trees produce an aromatic oil in their bark and leaves, once distilled commercially for the same compound used in mothballs and topical liniments, and crushing a leaf releases a sharp, medicinal scent unlike anything else growing nearby. The glorieta gained a small dedicated corner in 2023, the Rincón de Pepe Elías, named for a local garden historian, close enough to the camphor tree that visitors reading the memorial plaque stand in its shade without necessarily knowing which tree is the rare one. Being the only example of something is a modest kind of fame, and this tree has held it for years without anyone making a fuss about it.
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11
The Ficus of the Pila del Pato
Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa) · about 80 years · San Bartolomé, Casco Antiguo
A residents' association liked this tree enough to put it on their letterhead. The Indian laurel fig on the Plaza de San Leandro, known by the duck fountain it stands beside, was probably planted around 1945, going by photographs from the period. It survived the plaza's 1966 rebuild, when the bare earth square was paved over with cobbles and river stone, and the paving nearly finished it: the roots stopped getting air, branches died back from the tips, and the tree went into visible decline. The parks service drilled a ring of shafts around the root crown to let oxygen and nutrients back down, and it recovered fast. A bench built too close was later removed for the same reason. In 2019 the Asociación de Vecinos Casco Antiguo, working with the city, widened the planting pit and put new planting around it, and the association took the tree as its logo. It now measures 4.77 metres round with a crown 21 metres wide, and it has quietly reduced its own canopy over the years in response to the root damage, a tree editing itself down to what it can support. The city was still working on its soil in October 2025.
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12
The Magnolia of the Cathedral
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · about 85 years · Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo
The best evidence for this tree's age is photographs it does not appear in. Shots taken from the Teatro Coliseo in 1931 and from the corner of the cathedral in 1934 show the spot empty, which puts the planting in the early 1940s and makes this magnolia much younger than the Gothic wall it stands against, begun in 1401. By 1965 it was well grown. Then the city nearly killed it by tidying up. The pedestrianisation of the Avenida de la Constitución in 2007 and the tram works that followed shrank its planting bed and laid slabs over the roots that were still doing the work, and it was one of only three notable trees on the avenue to come through those works at all. It declined so visibly that both the parks service and ordinary passers-by were alarmed. In June 2021 the city spent 18,500 euros lifting the paving again, widening the bed, draining it, treating soil that had gone too limey, and putting in irrigation and a low pomegranate hedge to keep feet off the roots. Seville's own inventory now rates it stressed but recovering. The assessment is blunt about the cause: this was not weather or disease, it was the pavement.
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13
The Pineapple Guava of the Plaza de Santa Cruz
Pineapple Guava (Acca sellowiana) · about 105 years · Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo
Children in this square have known for a century that the green fruit on it tastes of pineapple. The pineapple guava normally stops at a shrub of four or five metres. This one reached six, and it did so because it has been left alone since about 1921, when the architect Juan Talavera laid out the Plaza de Santa Cruz on ground cleared by the demolition of a church and planted the garden that still frames it. At the centre he set the Cruz de la Cerrajería, a wrought-iron cross forged in 1692 by Sebastián Conde, a blacksmith from Almonte, which had already been moved twice, from the corner of Calles Sierpes and Rioja to the Museo de Bellas Artes and finally here. The guava went in with the rest of the planting and has outlasted most of it. Its flowers are the show nobody expects from a fruit bush: white petals curled back around a crown of red stamens tipped with bright yellow pollen, held on the branch for weeks. The fruit needs a second tree's pollen to set, comes in a little larger than a medlar, and is what the neighbourhood remembers it for.
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14
The Pecan of the Real Alcázar
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · about 110 years · Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo
The tallest tree in the Alcázar gardens is a nut tree from the Mississippi valley, and almost nobody looks up at it. The pecan stands 37 metres in the Jardín del Marqués de la Vega Inclán, the garden José Gómez Millán laid out between 1913 and 1917 over what had been the Huerta del Retiro, the palace's working orchard. It was planted with the garden, alongside the other fruit trees Gómez Millán scattered through his design, so it is roughly as old as the layout around it. An older pecan grew near the Pabellón de Carlos V and was taken down when it became decrepit, which leaves this one carrying the species almost alone in the city. It is in unusually good order. Of the fifty-six individual trees in Seville's singular-tree inventory, this is one of a handful rated optimal on all three counts the city measures: physiological state, phytosanitary state and biomechanical structure. The inventory credits careful pruning across its whole life, and a planted border that keeps visitors off the ground under its canopy. Its trunk is 2.8 metres round, its crown 24 metres across, and it fruits into autumn, though the nuts are not yours to gather.
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15
The Fig of the University Moat
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · 56 years · Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo
A man in Seville asked the parks department in 1970 whether he could plant a tree to mark his son's birth. They said yes, brought a Moreton Bay fig to a bed on the Calle Palos de la Frontera, and let him throw the first spadefuls of earth in himself. That son turns fifty-six this year. So does the tree, and it has done rather better out of the arrangement: its trunk is now 6.12 metres round, thicker than any of the far older figs elsewhere in the city's inventory, and its crown spreads 28 metres, reaching sideways over the dry moat of the old Royal Tobacco Factory, the eighteenth-century building that has housed the University of Seville since the 1950s. In November 2025 the city brought in an Air Spade, a tool that blasts compacted soil apart with compressed air without tearing roots, and cut radial trenches around it to get the ground breathing again. The delegate who ordered the work called figs like this one part of the identity of Seville. Fifty-six years is nothing for a tree. This one has not read the memo.
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16
The Ficus of the Altozano
Rubber Fig (Ficus elastica) · 54 years · Triana Casco Antiguo, Triana
Triana's landmark tree began as a pot plant. The city kept large containerised specimens for dressing streets and squares during civic celebrations, and in 1972, when the monument to the bullfighter Juan Belmonte was inaugurated on the Plaza del Altozano, one of those container plants was put into the ground and left there. It is a rubber fig, and specifically the variety that was fashionable as a houseplant in the same decade, the kind that sat in a corner of a thousand Spanish living rooms. Seville's run of mild winters let this one keep going outdoors. Fifty-four years on it has a trunk 5.86 metres round and a crown 31 metres across, and it is the only shade on the square, covering both halves of it at once: the approach to the Puente de Isabel II, successor to the old bridge of boats, and the mouth of the Calle Betis running downriver. The city's inventory is candid that the tree is not especially old and says its value here is symbolic. It has paid for that status. Every year the Velá de Triana sets its stalls up around the trunk, and in some years cooks put stoves underneath, badly enough to burn the bark.
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17
The Magnolia of the Real Alcázar
Southern Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) · not documented · Santa Cruz
Four metres seventy round is a great deal of magnolia. This is a species most people meet as a well behaved garden tree with glossy leaves, and this one has a trunk six metres ten around at the base, tapering to 4.70 at chest height, carrying twenty metres of crown over the Baños de Doña María de Padilla, the vaulted rainwater tank beneath the Alcázar's Patio del Crucero.
It is not a local. Magnolia grandiflora comes from the wet forests of the American southeast and arrived in European gardens in the eighteenth century as a slow, expensive novelty for people who could afford to wait. Seville turned out to suit it better than most places did.
The city's 2022 survey of its singular trees records the tree's physiology as normal, its structure as normal and its overall condition as good, and then, in the box for biological agents, names Agrocybe aegerita, a wood decay fungus that fruits in tight clusters on living hardwoods. That is why its plant health reads as regular rather than clean. A tree this size carrying a decay fungus is neither unusual nor a death sentence, but it is the kind of thing a city writes down and comes back to.
The flowers open in May and June, cream coloured and the size of a spread hand, and you smell them before you find them.
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18
The Judas Tree of the Real Alcázar
Judas Tree (Cercis siliquastrum) · not documented · Santa Cruz
A Judas tree that has reached sixteen metres has done something the species does not normally bother with. Cercis siliquastrum is a small tree, usually topping out around eight or ten metres in a courtyard, and this one in the Alcázar's English Garden is twice the height of the ones people plant on purpose, with a trunk 2.20 metres round and a crown twelve metres across.
Its trick is the flowering. In March, before a single leaf shows, magenta pea flowers open straight out of the bark, on the old wood and the bare limbs as well as the twigs, so the whole frame of the tree turns pink for a fortnight. Botanists call it cauliflory, and almost nothing else in a European garden does it.
The Spanish call the species the árbol del amor, the love tree. English took the other tradition, that Judas hanged himself from one. Same tree, worse story.
The garden around it was planted from 1910, when the Alcázar laid out a cooler, shadier English counterpoint to its Andalusi courtyards. Nothing dates this particular tree. What the city's surveyors did record, when they measured it in July 2022, is a tree in optimal physiological condition with no plant health anomalies at all, which is not something they wrote about many of its neighbours.
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19
The Orange Tree of Pedro the Cruel
Bitter Orange (Citrus aurantium) · not documented · Santa Cruz
The measurements on this one tell a different story from the name. Two metres round at the base, thirty six centimetres at chest height, three metres tall: a broad old stool with a thin young trunk coming out of it, which is what a citrus looks like after it has been cut back, frozen back or died back and grown again more than once.
Seville's catalogue of singular trees lists it as El Naranjo de Pedro el Cruel, after Pedro I of Castile, called both the Cruel and the Just, who built the mudéjar palace still standing a short walk from here between 1364 and 1366. The catalogue does not say why the tree carries his name and does not date it. A bitter orange living six centuries would be remarkable, and nothing here shows that this one has. If you know when it was planted, or where the name came from, tell us and it goes on the page.
Bitter oranges have been planted in this city since Almohad rule for the scent of the blossom rather than the fruit, which is far too sour to eat straight and ends up in British marmalade instead. This one stands between the Pabellón de Carlos V and the Cenador del León, and the 2022 survey records it as physiologically stressed but in good overall condition.
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20
The Plane of the Macarena Wall
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented · San Gil
The longest surviving stretch of Seville's twelfth century wall has a plane tree growing against it. Twenty seven metres tall, 4.20 metres round at chest height and 5.90 at the base, with a crown eighteen and a half metres across, on Calle Muñoz León where the Almohad wall runs from the Puerta de la Macarena towards the basilica.
The London plane is a hybrid nobody set out to make. An oriental plane and an American plane crossed in a European garden in the seventeenth century and produced something tougher than either parent, which then went on to line half the avenues in Europe: it puts up with compacted soil, drought and dirty air, and sheds its bark in plates that carry the grime off with them. The Spanish name is plátano de sombra, the shade plane, which is an honest description of the job.
There is an administrative curiosity in the record. The city's 2022 survey lists the ground as municipal but marks it sin recepcionar, not yet formally taken over, so a monumental plane is growing in the gap between two departments. Its physiology, structure and plant health were all recorded as normal or clean at the time.
The wall behind it went up when Seville was the capital of an empire that reached Marrakesh.
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21
The Norfolk Island Pine of the Torre Norte
Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) · not documented · Parque de María Luisa
At 44 metres this is the second tallest tree in Seville's own survey of its singular trees, a conifer from a single small island in the Pacific standing taller than almost anything else the city has measured. Norfolk Island itself sits between Australia and New Zealand, and the species left it for European and Mediterranean gardens in the eighteenth century, prized for a symmetrical, tiered crown that looks almost architectural, branches whorled in even rings up a perfectly straight trunk.
The city's 2022 survey found this one in clean health throughout: normal physiology, no plant health anomalies, a sound structure, girth of 3.10 metres at chest height widening to 3.70 at the base. It stands by the Torre Norte, one of the twin towers Aníbal González built to frame the Plaza de España a few hundred metres away, so a tree from the far side of the world grows in the shadow of Seville's own 1920s monument to itself.
The pin here follows the catalogue's own coordinate rather than an independently confirmed position, in a park where more than one tree stands close together.
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22
The Plane of Juanita Reina
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented · Parque de María Luisa
This plane's girth runs to 4.42 metres at chest height and 5.02 at the base, wider than the more famous plane this site already lists on the Macarena wall, though shorter at 25 metres than that one's 27. Seville's 2022 survey found it structurally and physiologically normal, with no disease, but flagged two biological agents living on it: Kalotermes flavicollis, a drywood termite that colonises dead and weakened wood inside an otherwise healthy trunk, and Synanthedon codeti, a clearwing moth whose larvae bore into plane bark. Neither pushed its overall condition below good.
It stands at the Glorieta de Juanita Reina, one of the many named circular clearings that structure Parque de María Luisa, a garden the city built for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition out of what had been the private grounds of the Palacio de San Telmo. The plane itself is a hybrid nobody set out to make, crossed from an Oriental and an American species in a seventeenth century European garden and then planted everywhere for how well it tolerates exactly the conditions a public park subjects it to.
The coordinate here is the catalogue's own, unverified against an independent source.
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23
The Stone Pine of Monte Gurugú
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · not documented · Parque de María Luisa
The city's 2022 survey rates this stone pine's condition as optimal across every measure it takes: physiology, structure and plant health all clean, no biological agent recorded. Its crown spreads 21.5 metres, among the widest of any tree in the catalogue, the flat, umbrella-shaped canopy the species is named for in Spanish, pino piñonero, the pine that gives pine nuts.
It stands on the Monte Gurugú, an artificial hill inside Parque de María Luisa named, like several features of the park, after a real place, in this case a mountain near Melilla in Spanish North Africa, part of the layered, faintly exotic geography the park's nineteenth century designers built into its follies and mounds. Stone pine is native across the Mediterranean and has been cultivated for its edible seeds since Roman times, one of the oldest continuously harvested nut crops in Europe.
The coordinate is the catalogue's own. Two more stone pines already published on this site, at the Jardines de Cristina and elsewhere in the city, share the species; this one is distinguished by its position on the Gurugú and its unusually wide crown.
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The Bald Cypress of the Isla de los Patos
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · not documented · Parque de María Luisa
This bald cypress runs 35.7 metres tall, the tallest deciduous conifer in Seville's own survey of its singular trees, with a crown spreading 23.3 metres over the Isla de los Patos, the duck island inside one of Parque de María Luisa's ponds. Bald cypress is a wetland tree from the American South, and unlike almost every other conifer it drops its needles every autumn, going fully bare through winter before releasing fresh growth in spring, a habit that regularly confuses visitors expecting a conifer to stay green.
The survey recorded it in clean health across every measure: normal physiology, structure and plant health, no biological agent noted, a girth of 5.40 metres at chest height widening to 6.70 at the base. Growing beside water suits the species particularly well; in its native range a bald cypress standing in a swamp develops knobbly root growths called knees that rise above the waterline, though the catalogue records nothing about whether this one shows them.
A second Taxodium distichum already stands on this site's Seville list; this one, larger and on an island rather than open ground, is a different tree with its own story.
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25
The Plane of the Avenida de Bécquer
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · not documented · Parque de María Luisa
At 4.70 metres round, this is the widest plane in Seville's survey of its singular trees, wider than either the Macarena wall plane or the Glorieta de Juanita Reina plane already published on this site, though at 23 metres it is not the tallest. Its estimated base girth runs to about 6 metres, and the same two insects recorded on its Juanita Reina neighbour turn up here too, Kalotermes flavicollis and Synanthedon codeti, without dragging the tree's overall condition below good; the survey did flag its structure as compromised, worth a look if you visit.
It stands on the Avenida de Bécquer, a walk through Parque de María Luisa named for Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, the Sevillian Romantic poet whose monument sits nearby in the park. Named avenues of plane trees are one of the standard structural devices Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier used when he redesigned the park's grounds for the 1929 exposition, and this is one specimen out of what was originally a planted row.
The coordinate is the catalogue's own; not independently re-verified.
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The Windmill Palm of the Inner Wall
Chinese Windmill Palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) · not documented · Santa Cruz
Fifteen metres is tall for a windmill palm, a species that usually tops out well under that in cultivation. This one grows at a corner of the Alcázar's inner wall, its trunk wrapped in the dense fibrous mat the species never sheds, which gave it enough cold tolerance to become one of the few palms that survives outdoors as far north as the British Isles.
The city's 2022 survey rated it optimal on every measure it records: physiology, structure and plant health all clean, no biological agent noted. Trachycarpus fortunei comes from mountain forests in central China, considerably cooler and wetter than Seville, and it reached European gardens in the nineteenth century as one of the first palms hardy enough for a temperate climate rather than a Mediterranean one, which makes its presence inside a mudéjar palace garden built centuries before its arrival a small piece of that later horticultural history folded into an old wall.
The coordinate is the catalogue's own; inside the Alcázar's walled, ticketed grounds the named corner does more of the work than the pin.
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27
The Bougainvillea of the Puerta de Marchena
Bougainvillea (Bougainvillea spectabilis) · not documented · Santa Cruz
Bougainvillea is a vine everywhere else, sold in garden centres to climb a trellis or spill over a wall. Trained and left long enough, it can do something closer to what this one has done at the Alcázar's Puerta de Marchena: build two woody trunks, 91 and 54 centimetres round at the base, and rise 13 metres, tall enough that Seville's own survey of singular trees counted it among them rather than dismissing it as a climber.
The city's 2022 assessment found it in optimal condition throughout, physiology, structure and plant health all clean. The species is South American, and what looks like a single spectacular magenta flower is actually three tiny true flowers wrapped in three papery bracts, the bracts carrying the colour while the real flowers stay small and pale at the centre.
The Puerta de Marchena is one of several gates through the Alcázar's inner walls, and a plant usually grown for a single summer's colour has been given more than a century's worth of wall to work with here.
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The Fan Palm of the Cenador del León
European Fan Palm / Saint Peter's Palm (Chamaerops humilis) · not documented · Santa Cruz
Europe's only native palm usually grows as a low, multi-stemmed clump under two or three metres, more shrub than tree. This one, in the garden around the Alcázar's Cenador del León pavilion, has reached 7.2 metres, tall enough and old enough that Seville's survey of singular trees gave it a place on the list, an unusual honour for a species that spends most of its life as scrub on Mediterranean hillsides.
The city's 2022 assessment recorded it in optimal condition throughout, physiology, structure and plant health all clean. Chamaerops humilis is genuinely wild across southern Spain, Portugal and North Africa, tolerant of drought and poor soil in a way most ornamental palms are not, which is likely part of why a specimen given a long undisturbed run in a palace garden has grown so much larger than its usual roadside or scrubland relatives.
The Cenador del León, a domed viewing pavilion, gives its name to the garden around it, where this palm and a second catalogued tree both grow within the same walled space.
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The Sago Palm of the Jardín de las Damas
Sago Palm (Cycas revoluta) · not documented · Santa Cruz
This is not a palm at all, whatever its common name says. Cycas revoluta is a cycad, a member of a plant lineage that predates flowering plants and even most conifers, effectively unchanged since before the dinosaurs, and a 5.5 metre specimen represents a very long, very slow accumulation of growth: cycads add height at a fraction of the rate of almost any tree, sometimes only a centimetre or two a year.
Seville's 2022 survey rated it optimal throughout, physiology, structure and plant health all clean. It grows in the Jardín de las Damas, the Ladies' Garden, one of the Alcázar's formal Renaissance-era enclosures, where its stiff crown of dark, feather-like fronds reads as almost prehistoric against the clipped hedges and fountains around it.
The species is native to southern Japan, and every part of it is toxic if eaten, a fact that has not stopped it becoming one of the most widely planted ornamental cycads in warm gardens worldwide, valued for exactly the slow, architectural permanence a specimen this size demonstrates.
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30
The Cypress of San Fernando Cemetery
Mediterranean Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens) · not documented · San Fernando
A cemetery cypress is the least surprising tree on this list and one of the healthiest: Seville's 2022 survey recorded this one's physiology, structure and plant health all as normal or clean, standing 23 metres tall with a trunk 2.79 metres round. Mediterranean cypress has marked graveyards, from Persian gardens to Italian hillsides to Spanish cemeteries, for so many centuries that its narrow, flame-shaped silhouette reads almost automatically as a marker of the dead, a association old enough that Roman writers already described the practice.
Cementerio de San Fernando, opened in 1852 outside what was then the city's edge, holds Seville's own dead across more than a century and a half, bullfighters and flamenco singers and ordinary Sevillanos beside each other, and its older sections carry exactly the kind of mature planting a working cemetery this old accumulates without anyone setting out to build a garden.
The coordinate is the catalogue's own; the cemetery is large, and this cypress is one specimen among its older plantings.
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31
The River Red Gum of Pedro Salinas
River Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) · not documented · Nervión
At 42 metres this street tree is the third tallest in Seville's own survey of its singular trees, an Australian eucalypt growing over an ordinary residential street named for the poet Pedro Salinas. Its girth runs 5.30 metres at chest height, widening to 7.70 at the base, big enough that the tree reads as out of scale with the buildings around it.
The city's 2022 assessment found no structural or physiological problems, but recorded mild plant health anomalies and named two biological agents at work on it: Glycaspis brimblecombei, a sap-sucking psyllid that arrived in Europe from Australia in the early 2000s and has spread through eucalyptus plantings ever since, and Laetiporus sulphureus, the sulfur polypore, a fungus that feeds on heartwood in mature trees. Neither has pulled its overall condition below good, but both are worth knowing before you stand under it expecting a flawless specimen.
River red gum lines watercourses across the Australian interior, and it was planted worldwide through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for how fast it grows, which is most of how a street tree gets to 42 metres in the span of a human lifetime.
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32
The Fig of the Jardines de Chapina
Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa) · not documented · Triana
This fig grows two trunks from one root system, 2.10 and 1.97 metres round, and Seville's 2022 survey rated its condition optimal on every measure it took: physiology, structure and plant health all clean, the best possible mark a tree on this list can earn. It stands in the Jardines de Chapina, a strip of garden along the historic course of the Guadalquivir canal on the Triana side of the river, about 500 metres from a second Ficus microcarpa this site already publishes at El Altozano.
Indian laurel fig is native across a wide arc from India to northern Australia, and it is one of the most widely planted street and park trees in warm cities worldwide precisely because it tolerates pruning, pollution and root competition better than almost anything else, developing the dense, glossy-leaved crown and pale aerial roots that make old specimens look far larger than a single trunk would suggest.
Two Ficus microcarpa within an easy walk of each other, on opposite ends of the same riverside district, make a small Triana walk worth doing back to back if you visit one.
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33
The Mulberry of the Alamillo Cortijo
White Mulberry (Morus alba) · not documented · Parque del Alamillo
This mulberry's trunk runs 4 metres round, unusually thick for a species more often kept small and heavily pruned for its leaves than left to grow into a full tree. Seville's 2022 survey found it physiologically stressed with a compromised structure, though still supported and standing, and rated its overall condition good despite both flags.
It grows by the Cortijo, an old farmstead building preserved inside the Parque del Alamillo, the large public park built on the Isla de la Cartuja for Expo '92 around what had been the Duke of Alba's private hunting estate. White mulberry was planted across Spain for centuries to feed silkworms, an industry Seville itself once had a stake in, and a farmstead like the Cortijo would very plausibly have kept mulberries exactly like this one as a working crop tree rather than an ornamental.
Every June the tree drops pale, sweet fruit that stains whatever pavement or grass sits beneath it, the same fruit that made the species worth planting in the first place, long before anyone valued it for shade.
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34
The Senegal Date Palm of the Jardines de las Delicias
Senegal Date Palm (Phoenix reclinata) · not documented · Parque de María Luisa
Most palms grow one trunk from one root. Phoenix reclinata grows several, suckering from its base into a clump of curved, leaning stems that can eventually spread wider than they are tall, a habit that gives the species its name and its very different silhouette from the single straight trunks of most cultivated palms. This specimen's base runs 9.70 metres round, and Seville's 2022 survey rated it optimal on every measure: physiology, structure and plant health all clean.
It grows in the Jardines de las Delicias, a garden along the old Paseo de las Delicias that predates Parque de María Luisa next door, laid out in the nineteenth century as one of the city's first fashionable promenades. Senegal date palm is native across tropical and subtropical Africa, and it reached Spanish gardens as part of the same nineteenth and early twentieth century enthusiasm for exotic planting that filled Seville's parks with trees from every warm climate on earth.
The coordinate is the catalogue's own, not independently re-verified.
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35
The Canary Pine of the Engineering School
Canary Pine (Pinus canariensis) · not documented · Reina Mercedes
Seville's 2022 survey rated this pine optimal across every measure it records, physiology, structure and plant health all clean, standing 26 metres tall on the campus of the university's engineering informatics school. Canary pine is endemic to the Canary Islands, an archipelago whose isolation has made it one of the most botanically distinct places in Spain, and the species is remarkably fire-adapted even by pine standards: a mature Pinus canariensis can resprout new needles directly from a badly scorched trunk, a trait almost no other pine in the world shares.
A university campus is an unusual but not unheard of setting for a catalogued singular tree, the same pattern this site has already documented at Cork's University College campus arboretum; a public university's open grounds put a tree like this within reach of any visitor walking through rather than only its students and staff.
The coordinate is the catalogue's own. If you know more about when this pine was planted or why, tell us.
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36
The Tipu Tree of the Parque de los Príncipes
Tipu Tree (Tipuana tipu) · not documented · Los Remedios
At 32 metres this tipu tree is taller than almost anything else planted for its flowers in Seville, a South American species from Bolivia and Argentina that has become one of the most widely planted ornamental trees across southern Spain for the show it puts on in early summer: loose sprays of yellow-orange pea flowers covering the whole crown, followed by a carpet of fallen petals thick enough to colour the pavement underneath.
Seville's 2022 survey found it in optimal physiological condition with normal structure and no plant health problems, girth 3.24 metres at chest height widening to 4.80 at the base. It grows in the Parque de los Príncipes, a park in the Los Remedios district on the west bank of the Guadalquivir, standing without another catalogued singular tree nearby, an isolated specimen rather than part of a cluster.
Tipuana tipu was introduced to Spain in the nineteenth century and took to the country's hot, dry summers well enough that it now self-seeds in some regions, an immigrant tree that has made itself entirely at home.
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37
The Viscote of the Paseo de Colón
Viscote (Parasenegalia visco) · not documented · Arenal
Most people walking the Paseo de Colón toward the Maestranza bullring have never heard of this tree's species, and that is most of the reason it made Seville's list of singular trees. Parasenegalia visco, still filed by its older name Acacia visco in some sources, is South American, native to the dry forests of Argentina, Bolivia and Paraguay, and it is rarely planted anywhere in Europe outside a handful of specimen collections.
The city's 2022 survey found it physiologically and biologically clean, with a structure it rated compromised but still standing, overall condition good, girth 1.75 metres at chest height and a crown 13.4 metres across, wide for a tree only 12.3 metres tall. The species carries fine, feathery bipinnate leaves and clusters of small pale flowers, closer in appearance to its more familiar acacia relatives than its unfamiliar name suggests.
It stands on the riverside promenade directly across from the Real Maestranza, one of Spain's most famous bullrings, a rare tree in plain view of one of the city's best known buildings.
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38
The Fig Tree of the Huerto del Rey Moro
Common Fig (Ficus carica) · over 300 years · San Julián, Casco Antiguo
The garden around this fig was taken by the people who live on the street. In 2004 neighbours in San Julián occupied the walled plot on Calle Enladrillada rather than watch it be built over, and they have run it themselves ever since. Their own account of the place calls the fig more than 300 years old, and that is as sharp as the figure gets, because nobody has dated it any further than that.
The city's 2022 survey of singular trees measured what can be measured. The tree stands 9.4 metres tall with a crown of roughly the same span, and the trunk runs 1.47 metres around at chest height, swelling to three metres where it enters the ground. The same survey marks it stressed and structurally compromised, its overall conservation only fair.
The ground under it has been worked for a long while. The plot was the domestic orchard of the Casa del Rey Moro, a house of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and it is now the largest public open space in Seville's old centre with nothing to buy in it.
The entrance is a gate at number 36, open daily, free. What you find behind it is a working neighbourhood garden with an old fig in the middle of it, held up by residents rather than by a parks department.
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39
The Stone Pine of the Jardines de Cristina
Stone Pine (Pinus pinea) · about 195 years · Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo
Queen María Cristina had a garden opened in her name on 24 July 1830, and a local gardens association names this pine, in bed 15, as a tree of that founding period. That is a source pointing at this specimen rather than at the garden's date, which puts it somewhere around 180 to 210 years old. Nobody has counted its rings, so the band stays broad.
It has grown into the size that goes with those years. Twenty five metres tall, a trunk 2.80 metres around at chest height and 3.11 at the base, with the flat umbrella crown of a stone pine spreading 12.5 metres over the path. The city's 2022 survey finds its physiology and plant health clean and its structure compromised, which is common in a tree carrying that much canopy on one long bare stem.
The Jardines de Cristina are 8,100 square metres of public ground wedged between the Puerta de Jerez and the Guadalquivir, and this pine has stood through the whole of their public life, including the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition that rebuilt this end of Seville around it and the tram line that now runs past the gate.
Stone pine has been grown around the Mediterranean for its edible seeds since Roman times. This one is a city tree, two minutes from a tram stop, and it is free to walk under at any hour.
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40
The Multi-Stemmed Palm of the Conde de Colombi
Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera) · El Prado-Parque de María Luisa, Sur
A date palm is meant to be one trunk and a crown. This one is a cluster of them, and that is the entire reason the city put it in its 2022 survey of singular trees: it lists the palm as multi-stemmed, which is not how the species usually presents itself.
The measurement sheet shows the consequence. There is no chest-height girth for this tree, because the standard measurement at 1.30 metres has nothing single to be taken around; the surveyors recorded 8.75 metres at the base instead, a figure that covers the whole bundle of stems rather than any one trunk. The palm reaches 15.8 metres, with a crown averaging 11.5 metres across. Physiology, plant health and structure are all rated normal, which for a tree of this shape is worth noting on its own.
It stands on the Avenida del Conde de Colombi inside Parque de María Luisa, the park Seville laid out from the Montpensier estate and filled with exotics for the 1929 exhibition, and it shares that ground with nine other trees on this map. It is a ten minute walk from the Prado de San Sebastián interchange, past the Plaza de España, and it costs nothing to stand under.
Nobody has put an age on it, and the survey does not try. If you know when it went in, tell us.
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41
The Harp Eucalyptus of the Guadalquivir
River Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) · Tablada, Los Remedios
Two organisms are working on Seville's big river gums at once, and this one on the Guadalquivir bank carries both. Glycaspis brimblecombei is a sap-sucking psyllid that followed eucalyptus out of Australia and reached Europe in the early 2000s. Laetiporus sulphureus is the sulphur polypore, the bracket fungus sold elsewhere as chicken of the woods, which feeds on heartwood. The same pair is recorded on El Gran Capitán in the Jardines de Murillo and on the river red gum of Calle Pedro Salinas, so this is pest pressure on a species across the city rather than one unlucky tree.
Neither has finished it. The city's 2022 survey rates its physiology and plant health clean and its structure compromised, and puts it at 18 metres tall. The trunk measures three metres around, but read that figure carefully: the surveyors took it three metres up rather than at the standard chest height, so it does not compare like for like with the other girths in the catalogue.
It stands out in Tablada, on the west bank south of the centre, on the Anillo Verde path that runs along the river. This is a bike ride or a long walk rather than a stroll from the cathedral, and the reward is a very large tree on open riverside ground with a gate nowhere in it.
No age is recorded anywhere. If you know it, tell us.
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The Grapefruit of the Cartuja Monastery
Grapefruit (Citrus x paradisi) · Triana Oeste, Triana
Grapefruit is a young fruit. The hybrid was first recorded in Barbados in the eighteenth century, which means no grapefruit tree anywhere can be truly ancient, however large it grows. This one grows large. It stands 14 metres with a crown of 13, and its trunk runs 2.20 metres around, measured at 0.85 metres rather than the usual chest height, widening to 2.50 at the base. For a citrus, that is close to absurd.
It lives in the Huerta Grande, one of the two old orchards of the Cartuja monastery. Carthusian monks farmed this ground from the fifteenth century, and the orchards outlasted them, the English china factory that took the buildings over in the nineteenth century, and the Expo of 1992 that rebuilt the island around the walls. The monastery is now the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, and the visitor route through it finishes in those orchards, so the tree is on the standard path rather than behind a staff door.
There is an entry fee of a few euros, waived all day on Saturdays and from seven in the evening Tuesday to Friday, and the site closes on Mondays. The city's 2022 survey rates the tree normal on physiology, plant health and structure, and gives it no age at all. Nobody appears to have recorded when it was planted. If a monastery or factory record says otherwise, tell us and we will add it.
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The Lagunaria of the Jardines de la Madrina
Norfolk Island Hibiscus (Lagunaria patersonii) · Santa Cruz, Casco Antiguo
In Australia this species is called the itchy bomb tree, because its seed capsules split to release fibrous hairs that irritate any skin that handles them. Look, do not collect. The Norfolk Island hibiscus is otherwise a generous tree, opening pale pink flowers of obvious hibiscus shape through the first half of summer, and this is a large one: 22 metres tall, a trunk 2.75 metres around at chest height widening to 4.33 at the base, and a crown averaging 10.3 metres. The city's 2022 survey rates it optimal on physiology and good on conservation, clean on every measure it takes.
Where it stands takes a sentence of care. The Jardines de la Madrina are a small city-run garden beside the Casino de la Exposición, a surviving piece of the old San Telmo estate that the council recovered and reopened as public ground between 2013 and 2015. They are not the gardens of the Palacio de San Telmo next door, which houses the Andalusian presidency and can only be visited by appointment. This one you walk into, free, off the street.
Its age is an open question and we are leaving it open. The city's catalogue treats it as a notable old specimen, while a Seville gardens association puts the city's oldest lagunarias at the Jardines de Cristina and the Real Alcázar instead. Nobody has published a date for this trunk. If someone has one, we would like it.
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