The Cypress of San Fernando Cemetery

A cemetery cypress is the least surprising tree on this list and one of the healthiest: Seville's 2022 survey recorded this one's physiology, structure and plant health all as normal or clean, standing 23 metres tall with a trunk 2.79 metres round. Mediterranean cypress has marked graveyards, from Persian gardens to Italian hillsides to Spanish cemeteries, for so many centuries that its narrow, flame-shaped silhouette reads almost automatically as a marker of the dead, a association old enough that Roman writers already described the practice. Cementerio de San Fernando, opened in 1852 outside what was then the city's edge, holds Seville's own dead across more than a century and a half, bullfighters and flamenco singers and ordinary Sevillanos beside each other, and its older sections carry exactly the kind of mature planting a working cemetery this old accumulates without anyone setting out to build a garden. The coordinate is the catalogue's own; the cemetery is large, and this cypress is one specimen among its older plantings.