The Bald Cypress of the Isla de los Patos

This bald cypress runs 35.7 metres tall, the tallest deciduous conifer in Seville's own survey of its singular trees, with a crown spreading 23.3 metres over the Isla de los Patos, the duck island inside one of Parque de María Luisa's ponds. Bald cypress is a wetland tree from the American South, and unlike almost every other conifer it drops its needles every autumn, going fully bare through winter before releasing fresh growth in spring, a habit that regularly confuses visitors expecting a conifer to stay green. The survey recorded it in clean health across every measure: normal physiology, structure and plant health, no biological agent noted, a girth of 5.40 metres at chest height widening to 6.70 at the base. Growing beside water suits the species particularly well; in its native range a bald cypress standing in a swamp develops knobbly root growths called knees that rise above the waterline, though the catalogue records nothing about whether this one shows them. A second Taxodium distichum already stands on this site's Seville list; this one, larger and on an island rather than open ground, is a different tree with its own story.