The Fig Tree of the Huerto del Rey Moro

The garden around this fig was taken by the people who live on the street. In 2004 neighbours in San Julián occupied the walled plot on Calle Enladrillada rather than watch it be built over, and they have run it themselves ever since. Their own account of the place calls the fig more than 300 years old, and that is as sharp as the figure gets, because nobody has dated it any further than that. The city's 2022 survey of singular trees measured what can be measured. The tree stands 9.4 metres tall with a crown of roughly the same span, and the trunk runs 1.47 metres around at chest height, swelling to three metres where it enters the ground. The same survey marks it stressed and structurally compromised, its overall conservation only fair. The ground under it has been worked for a long while. The plot was the domestic orchard of the Casa del Rey Moro, a house of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and it is now the largest public open space in Seville's old centre with nothing to buy in it. The entrance is a gate at number 36, open daily, free. What you find behind it is a working neighbourhood garden with an old fig in the middle of it, held up by residents rather than by a parks department.