The Fig Tree of Rua Faro

In 1980 this fig became the first tree the city of Rio ever landmarked, and it took a protest in the street to get there. A construction company had plans for a building at number 45 of Rua Faro and wanted the tree felled or cut hard back. On 8 January 1980 more than a hundred residents turned out under it, led by the lawyer Leonel Kaz, and the campaign founded a neighbourhood association that still exists. A federal protection order came first and was then annulled by the same federal body that had issued it. The city's newly formed heritage council stepped in, and Decreto 2.783 of 23 September 1980 made the tree a protected municipal asset. Two days earlier the Jornal do Brasil had run the story across the front of its Caderno B. Its age is disputed and we are not going to settle it. JB em Folhas, retelling the rescue in 2023, calls it over 200 years old. AMAJB's own history of itself calls it a living being of more than 350 years. The band here holds both. The fig grew up beside the old path to the seventeenth-century Capela de Nossa Senhora da Cabeça, when the Faro family owned the Chácara da Cabeça here in the nineteenth century. Neither account names the species beyond fig. If you know which one it is, tell us.