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.
In fruit
September to November: the harvest, when the fruit turns from green to black
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Plaça de Cort, in front of the Ajuntament de PalmaThe single olive tree standing directly in front of the Ajuntament building on Placa de Cort, its wide low crown and thick multi-stemmed trunk unmistakable against the square's stone facades.
Free, on the open public square in front of Palma's town hall, no gate or opening hours
In the old town, about 10 minutes' walk from Plaça d'Espanya (Metro de Mallorca and the main EMT bus hub)
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
