The False Acacias of the Caballo Blanco

The medieval building beside these trees went up in the 1960s, put together from the remains of an old palace on the calle Nueva. The trees around it are the genuinely old part of the scene. This is the Caballo Blanco, at the Redín corner of the city walls, which Pamplona's 2010 book of old and singular trees calls one of the most beautiful and unusual places in the city. A group of false acacias grows here, somewhere between four and ten of them, and the book chose them for one quality, the beauty of their twisted form in a singular setting. Old, contorted trunks, it says, that bring beauty and colour to the place. The trunk it measured is 2.98 metres round at chest height and 17 metres tall. The species grows strong, tortuous branches by habit, and these have had the time to make the most of it. The authors admit that the best thing here is not the trees but the view. The sixteenth-century Redín bastion makes a lookout over Monte Ezkaba, Arantzadi and the districts of the Rochapea and the Chantrea, the river country below the walls where several other trees on this page stand. Close by, in the inner courtyard of the old teacher training college, the book notes a big sequoia as well. Nobody has put an age on the acacias. If you know it, tell us.