S'Olivera de Cort

This olive is older than the square it stands in, and it has only been standing there since 1989. It grew for centuries at Pedruixella Petit, an estate near Pollenca with about two thousand olive trees, until a city gardener and the head of public works came to its owner, the hotelier Jaime Batle, and asked to buy it for the town hall square. Batle refused to sell. When he learned where it would go, he gave it away instead. On 3 May 1989 the tree was lifted whole and replanted in Placa de Cort, directly opposite Palma's Ajuntament. Its trunk measures about seven metres round and two and a half tall before the first of four thick primary branches, on a tree only six metres high in total, the classic shape of an olive that has spent five or six centuries getting wider rather than taller. The city promised Batle a plaque with his name on it. Four mayors came and went before it was finally installed, thirty years after the gift. By then the tree needed no introduction: it had become one of the most photographed things in Palma, a six-hundred-year-old symbol of peace and rootedness parked in front of the seat of city government, exactly where a gardener once thought it belonged.