The Pineapple Guava of the Plaza de Santa Cruz

Children in this square have known for a century that the green fruit on it tastes of pineapple. The pineapple guava normally stops at a shrub of four or five metres. This one reached six, and it did so because it has been left alone since about 1921, when the architect Juan Talavera laid out the Plaza de Santa Cruz on ground cleared by the demolition of a church and planted the garden that still frames it. At the centre he set the Cruz de la Cerrajería, a wrought-iron cross forged in 1692 by Sebastián Conde, a blacksmith from Almonte, which had already been moved twice, from the corner of Calles Sierpes and Rioja to the Museo de Bellas Artes and finally here. The guava went in with the rest of the planting and has outlasted most of it. Its flowers are the show nobody expects from a fruit bush: white petals curled back around a crown of red stamens tipped with bright yellow pollen, held on the branch for weeks. The fruit needs a second tree's pollen to set, comes in a little larger than a medlar, and is what the neighbourhood remembers it for.