The Ficus of the Altozano

Triana's landmark tree began as a pot plant. The city kept large containerised specimens for dressing streets and squares during civic celebrations, and in 1972, when the monument to the bullfighter Juan Belmonte was inaugurated on the Plaza del Altozano, one of those container plants was put into the ground and left there. It is a rubber fig, and specifically the variety that was fashionable as a houseplant in the same decade, the kind that sat in a corner of a thousand Spanish living rooms. Seville's run of mild winters let this one keep going outdoors. Fifty-four years on it has a trunk 5.86 metres round and a crown 31 metres across, and it is the only shade on the square, covering both halves of it at once: the approach to the Puente de Isabel II, successor to the old bridge of boats, and the mouth of the Calle Betis running downriver. The city's inventory is candid that the tree is not especially old and says its value here is symbolic. It has paid for that status. Every year the Velá de Triana sets its stalls up around the trunk, and in some years cooks put stoves underneath, badly enough to burn the bark.