The Magnolias of Jardim de Arca d'Água

This garden holds 96 plane trees, 57 camellias and 13 southern magnolias, and only the magnolias are protected. The set was classified in 2021, which means the state looked at everything growing in the Jardim de Arca d'Água and singled out the smallest group in it. Finding them takes a minute of looking. The garden covers 22,000 square metres and the register gives one coordinate standing in for all thirteen, so the pin here points at the garden rather than at the trees. They are not hard to pick out once you are inside. Magnolia grandiflora has thick dark leaves with a rust-brown felt on the underside, quite unlike the planes and the camellias around them, and in early summer the flowers are the size of a plate. No age is recorded for them. The register gives one representative trunk at 2.43 metres round and leaves the rest blank, so the honest answer is that nobody has dated these trees. The garden opened in 1928 in Paranhos, on ground named for its arca de água, the stone chamber where a spring is captured and held. The springs here supplied Porto with water for centuries before anyone thought to lay a bandstand and a playground over them.