The Sequoia of the Palacio de Navarra

There is a Californian redwood in the middle of Pamplona and it belongs to the government. The Palacio de Navarra on Avenida Carlos III is the seat of the regional administration, and the walled garden behind its facade holds a giant sequoia that Navarra declared a Natural Monument in 1991, one of the first tranche. It is the only one of the region's 47 declared trees inside a city. Sequoiadendron giganteum reached Europe as seed in 1853 and inside a decade it was the tree every institution and estate in the west wanted, so a nineteenth century administrative palace with a redwood in its garden is not an eccentricity, it is exactly what the fashion produced. What Navarra does not publish is any measurement of it at all, or an age. The register carries the species, the place, the year of declaration and a coordinate and stops there. The garden is enclosed, which makes this a tree you generally see over a wall from the avenue rather than stand under, and it is tall enough for that to work.