The Giant Sequoia of Plaza de Anaya

This tree could outlive the cathedral it faces. Giant sequoias run past two thousand years in the Sierra Nevada; Salamanca's new cathedral was begun in 1513 and finished in the eighteenth century, and the sequoia in the square in front of it was lifted into place in 1976, already roughly ten to twenty years old, by order of the mayor Pablo Beltran de Heredia y Onis. A plaque at the base records the donation. 1976 was Spain's first full year without Franco, with the country in the middle of deciding what it would become next. Somewhere in that, a decision was taken to move a Californian conifer into the Plaza de Anaya, the square held between the Cathedral, the Anaya Palace and the church of San Sebastian, which is about as much architecture as Salamanca can put in one place. It was measured at about 20 metres in 2020, with a dense green canopy, strong growth and no visible structural damage. That puts it somewhere near 60 to 70 years old today, an adolescent for a species that counts in millennia, and it is worth being clear that this is an estimate built from the transplant date rather than a figure anyone has cored out of the wood. Everything else in the square is finished. This is the one thing in it that will look different in a hundred years.