The Sequoia of the University

The University of Salamanca has been teaching since 1218, and the oldest living thing it owns arrived in 1870. That year Federico de Onis y Onis donated a coast redwood, which went into the courtyard of the Escuelas Mayores and has been there since, 27 metres tall with a trunk 2.64 metres round. A local newspaper calls it the institution's oldest living monument, at roughly 156 years, which makes it comfortably the youngest thing in a patio otherwise made of Renaissance stone. Coast redwood belongs on a fog belt in northern California, where it is the tallest tree species on earth and routinely clears 100 metres. Salamanca is dry, baked in summer and 800 metres above the sea, which is not that climate at all. A redwood that has held on here for a century and a half inside a walled courtyard is doing something the species never evolved to do. One caution about the paperwork. The regional register of notable trees carries a Sequoia de la Universidad as AS-SA-10 with those measurements, and the newspaper account of the 1870 donation describes the redwood in the Escuelas Mayores courtyard without naming the register entry. Only one sequoia is on record in that complex, so they are almost certainly the same tree, but no single source says so outright. The Escuelas Mayores charges entry. The tree is on the visitor route inside.