The Fig of the University Moat

A man in Seville asked the parks department in 1970 whether he could plant a tree to mark his son's birth. They said yes, brought a Moreton Bay fig to a bed on the Calle Palos de la Frontera, and let him throw the first spadefuls of earth in himself. That son turns fifty-six this year. So does the tree, and it has done rather better out of the arrangement: its trunk is now 6.12 metres round, thicker than any of the far older figs elsewhere in the city's inventory, and its crown spreads 28 metres, reaching sideways over the dry moat of the old Royal Tobacco Factory, the eighteenth-century building that has housed the University of Seville since the 1950s. In November 2025 the city brought in an Air Spade, a tool that blasts compacted soil apart with compressed air without tearing roots, and cut radial trenches around it to get the ground breathing again. The delegate who ordered the work called figs like this one part of the identity of Seville. Fifty-six years is nothing for a tree. This one has not read the memo.