The Cedar of La Alamedilla (Pino de San Jose)

Salamanca calls this tree the Pino de San Jose, and it is not a pine. It is a cedar, and even that is not settled. The plaque on it reads Cedrus libani, the cedar of Lebanon, while Juan Manuel Velasco, who wrote the book on the province's parks and gardens, argues from the leaves that it is more likely a hybrid with the Himalayan Cedrus deodara. Neither reading has won. It went into the ground between 1880 and 1890, alongside the elms planted when La Alamedilla was laid out as a public park from 1879, the elms that gave the place its name. Those are gone. The cedar is the tallest tree in the park and one of the last survivors of that first planting, which is why the city calls it the grandfather of the Alamedilla, and why generations of Salamantinos have a childhood memory attached to it. The numbers disagree as well, and the disagreement is worth seeing. One newspaper, citing municipal measurements from 2018, gives 4.30 metres as a diameter at chest height and a height over 25 metres. Another gives 4.30 metres as the trunk's perimeter and a height of 33. A diameter of 4.30 would mean a girth around 13.5 metres, which would make this one of the largest conifers in Europe and is not credible at roughly 130 years. Read it as a girth and the figures behave. Storms have taken branches in recent years. It still stands.