The Six Araucarias of Largo Jose Afonso

Six trees stand in a ring around one old circular stone tank with a fountain at its middle, and at twenty-six metres they are the tallest classified trees in the city. They were planted around 1919, which means they have watched the square change names three times and change purpose twice. It began as the Passeio do Lago, named for a garden with a lake at its centre. In January 1911 it became the Parque das Escolas, after two primary schools opened on it, one for boys and one for girls, so the young trees spent their first decades in a schoolyard. Through the 1930s the square held two open-air cinemas, one of them run by the volunteer fire brigade and the other called the Cine Parque, and films were projected under these branches on summer evenings. The name it carries now arrived in 1988, for Jose Afonso, whose song Grandola, Vila Morena was the radio signal that launched the revolution of 1974, and Grandola is in this district. The trees are evergreen, so they look the same in January as in July.