The Ombú of La Cartuja

This ombú, a soft-wooded relative of spinach that grows to the size of an oak, is said to have come from seeds Hernando Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, brought back from South America and planted in his own private arboretum around 1529. After his death the seeds, or the seedling itself, passed to the Carthusian monks next door, and the tree has stood at the Monasterio de la Cartuja ever since, possibly the first ombú ever grown in Europe. It nearly didn't survive the twentieth century. In the early 1990s, restorers tried to seal cavities in its soft trunk with polyurethane foam, a technique meant for harder wood that instead trapped moisture and fed the fungus already eating the tree from inside. Expo '92 technicians removed the foam before it could finish the job, but the extraction itself caused more damage, and the tree has been left deliberately untouched since. Its wood is famously soft, closer to a swollen vegetable than timber, which is why arborists now recommend a fence and a no-walking perimeter rather than any further intervention. The monastery today houses Andalusia's contemporary art museum, so a tree that may have crossed the Atlantic in a conquistador's son's luggage now shares its courtyard with rotating exhibitions of modern sculpture.