The Plane of Largo Doutor Francisco Soveral

This tree is not a specimen you look at, it is the ceiling of a small square in the old town. Twenty-six metres tall with a crown twenty-seven metres across, it covers the whole of Largo Doutor Francisco Soveral, so the shade underneath is not a patch but a room. That is what the plane was bred for. It is a hybrid, a cross between the American sycamore and the Oriental plane that turned up in Europe in the seventeenth century and proved almost impossible to kill in a dirty city: it shrugs off exhaust, tolerates brutal pruning and sheds its bark in patches to throw off the grime, which is why half the capitals of Europe are lined with them. In a port city with a canning industry those were useful qualities. At around seventy years it is one of the younger classified trees here and it earns its place on presence rather than age, which is worth being honest about. Come in summer and you will understand why the state bothered to protect a seventy-year-old street tree.