The Bougainvillea of the Puerta de Marchena

Bougainvillea is a vine everywhere else, sold in garden centres to climb a trellis or spill over a wall. Trained and left long enough, it can do something closer to what this one has done at the Alcázar's Puerta de Marchena: build two woody trunks, 91 and 54 centimetres round at the base, and rise 13 metres, tall enough that Seville's own survey of singular trees counted it among them rather than dismissing it as a climber. The city's 2022 assessment found it in optimal condition throughout, physiology, structure and plant health all clean. The species is South American, and what looks like a single spectacular magenta flower is actually three tiny true flowers wrapped in three papery bracts, the bracts carrying the colour while the real flowers stay small and pale at the centre. The Puerta de Marchena is one of several gates through the Alcázar's inner walls, and a plant usually grown for a single summer's colour has been given more than a century's worth of wall to work with here.