Figueira das Lagrimas (Fig Tree of Tears)

The street is named for the goodbyes said under this tree. Estrada das Lágrimas, the Road of Tears, was the way out of São Paulo, and families came this far with sons leaving for the Paraguayan War and with law students bound away from the city. The fig at the roadside is where they stopped and turned back. A Portuguese traveller, Emiliano Zaluar, wrote of its magnificence in 1861, and one São Paulo account calls it the oldest documented tree in the city. No source gives an age with a stated basis behind it, so two centuries and more is as far as the evidence honestly goes. Tradition has both Pedro I and Pedro II passing beneath it. It nearly went. The tree was ailing by the 1970s and faced removal; a Ficus benjamina seeded itself alongside in 1977 and is growing there still; necrotic wood was cut out of the trunk in 2001. Municipal agronomists have watched it ever since and report good signs of recovery. The state declared it environmental heritage in 1989, or 1988 depending on which account you read, which made felling it illegal, and the city listed it again in 2016. In 2019 the wall around it came down so that people could get close to it again. It stands now in a small fenced enclosure on an ordinary street, with plaques at its foot: a quiet spot for the place where a city did its crying.