The Atlas Cedar of Quinta Primo Madeira

Three named architects have worked on this small garden, and the trees outlasted every plan. Casa Primo Madeira is a late 19th-century palacete on Rua do Campo Alegre, built for the textile industrialist Primo Monteiro Madeira, altered for him by José Marques da Silva, then bought by the University of Porto and restored between 1986 and 1988 by Fernando Távora, with the garden itself remodelled by the landscape architect Francisco Caldeira Cabral. Through all of it the Atlas cedar stayed exactly where it was. On 30 November 2004 Portugal's official gazette classified it a tree of public interest together with two neighbours on the same lawn, a tulip tree and a plane, which is a high concentration of protected trees for a garden this size. The cedar measures 4.05 metres around at chest height and stands about 20 metres tall, with a crown roughly as wide as it is high. Cedrus atlantica comes from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria, where it is now classed as endangered in the wild while growing untroubled in park after European park, an inversion that says more about grazing and logging at home than about the tree. The house is Pólo 3 of the University today. Walk in during university hours, stand on the lawn, and all three protected trees are in sight at once.