Wat is de oudste boom van Seville?

The ombu at the Monasterio de la Cartuja has a stronger claim to age than anything else documented in Seville: local tradition holds that Hernando Colon, Christopher Columbus's son, planted it from seeds gathered in South America around 1529, in his own private arboretum, and that the tree or its seed passed to the neighbouring Carthusian monks after his death. If the date holds, it may be the first ombu ever grown in Europe. The tree nearly died in the early 1990s when a botched restoration sealed cavities in its trunk with polyurethane foam, trapping moisture that fed the fungus already damaging the wood; Expo '92 technicians removed the foam just in time, though the removal caused its own damage; the tree has been left untouched since. It grows on the grounds of the former monastery, which today houses the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo (CAAC), on Isla de la Cartuja across the river from central Seville. Most other candidates for Seville's oldest tree turn out to be twentieth-century arrivals: the city's famous fig and eucalyptus trees mostly date to the 1910s and 1920s, and the orange trees in the cathedral's Patio de los Naranjos were replanted within living memory.