What is the oldest tree in Sao Paulo?

A Portuguese traveller, Emiliano Zaluar, wrote of the fig's magnificence in 1861, and one Sao Paulo account calls it the oldest documented tree in the city; no source gives it a precise age with a stated basis, so two centuries and more is as far as the evidence honestly goes. Tradition holds that both Pedro I and Pedro II passed beneath it. The street beside it, Estrada das Lagrimas, the Road of Tears, was the route out of the city, and families came this far to say goodbye to sons leaving for the Paraguayan War and to law students bound away: the fig at the roadside is where they turned back. It nearly died in the 1970s and faced removal; a younger Ficus benjamina seeded itself alongside it in 1977 and still grows there. Necrotic wood was cut from the trunk in 2001, and agronomists have watched it since and report good signs of recovery. The state declared it environmental heritage in 1989. In 2019 the wall around it came down so visitors could approach it again.