The Cypress of the Glorieta de Bécquer

Seville built a monument to its most famous Romantic poet around a tree that had nothing to do with him. The bald cypress at the centre of the Glorieta de Bécquer was already standing, planted sometime between 1850 and 1870, when the city commissioned sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera to surround it with white marble and bronze figures representing three stages of love, a monument inaugurated in 1911, decades before Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's poetry made this corner of Parque de María Luisa a literary pilgrimage site. The tree itself, native to the swamps of the Mississippi basin, is a curious choice for a Mediterranean city: it needs no flooding to thrive, but it does drop its needles every winter like a broadleaf tree, a trait most conifers don't share. At around 150 to 175 years old, with a trunk 5.82 metres round and a crown reaching 33 metres, it now frames whichever restoration the poet's monument currently needs, which has been more than once. Photographers queue for the same shot from the same bench angle nearly every day of the year. Almost none of them come for the tree.