The Sago Palm of the Jardín de las Damas

This is not a palm at all, whatever its common name says. Cycas revoluta is a cycad, a member of a plant lineage that predates flowering plants and even most conifers, effectively unchanged since before the dinosaurs, and a 5.5 metre specimen represents a very long, very slow accumulation of growth: cycads add height at a fraction of the rate of almost any tree, sometimes only a centimetre or two a year. Seville's 2022 survey rated it optimal throughout, physiology, structure and plant health all clean. It grows in the Jardín de las Damas, the Ladies' Garden, one of the Alcázar's formal Renaissance-era enclosures, where its stiff crown of dark, feather-like fronds reads as almost prehistoric against the clipped hedges and fountains around it. The species is native to southern Japan, and every part of it is toxic if eaten, a fact that has not stopped it becoming one of the most widely planted ornamental cycads in warm gardens worldwide, valued for exactly the slow, architectural permanence a specimen this size demonstrates.