The Yew of the Tres Reyes Roundabout

This yew lives on a traffic roundabout, and Pamplona's town plan protects it as a listed element at grade 2. The city's 2010 book of old and singular trees calls it an elegant landmark in the middle of town and, in its introduction, a born survivor against the advance of asphalt. That is a fair description of a tree whose neighbours are lanes of cars. It stands in front of the Hotel Tres Reyes, which went up in 1962 on part of the Bosquecillo, a wooded triangle of the Taconera gardens where, the book records, there had been a dovecote and a pond with ducks and sometimes swans. The trunk is modest, 1.83 metres round at chest height on a single leader, with a crown 13.5 metres across. The height is another matter. At 16.5 metres it is taller than the 10 to 15 metres the book gives as what a yew usually reaches, often as little more than a shrub. Yews are among the longest-lived trees in Europe, and the book is candid that the mountains of Navarra hold far bigger and older ones than anything in the city. Every part of the tree is poisonous except the red flesh around the seed, and its tough, springy wood once made bows. The same roundabout holds hackberries that the book also lists as singular. Nobody has dated the yew. If you know when it was planted, tell us.