The Ficus de la Misericòrdia

Local naturalist writers call this without qualification the biggest tree in Palma, and the numbers back the claim: a trunk over two metres across, more than twenty metres tall, and a crown reported at around thirty five metres, planted around 1827 when the old General Hospital laid out a botanical garden here. The building it grows beside, the Casa de la Misericordia, took in Palma's poor from 1565 onward; it is a cultural centre run by the Consell de Mallorca now, with free entry to its two courtyards and this garden. The tree has outgrown its bed in more than one direction. When the city dug up the nearby Rambla for works, it found the fig's roots running under the street, well beyond the garden wall that was supposed to contain them. At the base, a ring of decorative stones from the original nineteenth century planter still survives, now half swallowed by the trunk that has spent two centuries thickening around it. Along with a second giant fig in Palma's municipal cemetery, planted at roughly the same time, this is one of the two largest Ficus macrophylla in the Balearic Islands, and by most measurements the larger of the pair.