Palma's other giant fig, planted around the same decades as the one at the Misericordia garden, grows inside the city's municipal cemetery, where it has had a century and a half to spread five massive branches out from a neck seven metres and ten centimetres round, measured at chest height in 2011. It is not as tall as its cousin across town, about fifteen metres against twenty, but what it lacks in height it makes up in reach: surface roots run out from the trunk in every direction, thick enough to break paving and shoulder headstones aside. A cemetery might seem an odd place to send someone looking for a remarkable tree, but Palma's is landscaped rather than merely functional, and this fig is one of two enormous Ficus macrophylla shading its older section, giving what could be a bleak place genuine, peaceful shade. Together with the Misericordia fig, it ranks among the largest specimens of its kind anywhere in the Balearic Islands. The cemetery is open to visitors daily, no ticket required, and asks only the ordinary courtesy any burial ground does.
This tree looks much the same in every month of the year, so there is no season to chart.
Cementiri Municipal de Palma, Camí de Jesús 2, PalmaOne of two giant figs in the cemetery's older section, the wide-spreading surface roots and five thick primary branches setting it apart from the cypresses that dominate the rest of the grounds.
Free, inside the Cementiri Municipal de Palma; open daily 8:30am to 7:30pm
EMT city bus toward Cami de Jesus; roughly 2km, 25 minutes on foot, from the old town
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
