The Washerwomen's Planes of the Curtidores Bridge

These trees exist because the washerwomen of Pamplona asked for them. In the middle of the nineteenth century the women who did the city's laundry on the bank of the Arga wanted shade while they worked, and the planes were planted at their request. The washing has long gone from the river. The trees have not. Pamplona's own book of old and singular trees, published by the city in 2010, counts the group at the Curtidores bridge at somewhere between 25 and 100 planes, and gives a sample trunk at 2.52 metres round and 20 metres tall. Planted around the middle of that century, they are some 160 to 180 years old, which in a city the same book found to have mostly young trees puts them among the elders. The bridge joins the Rochapea, the low district on the north bank, to the Casco Viejo on its ridge, and the book reckons hundreds of people cross it every day. What they see is the detail the book singles out. The branches lean out and down until they brush the water. The river is also taking something back. Erosion has been stripping the soil from the roots, which stand more exposed every year, as they do under other groups of planes along the Arga. A tree planted for women washing at the water's edge is slowly being undercut by the same water.