The Trees of the Alameda de Hércules

Seville's oldest public promenade was built on a swamp, and it takes its name from the trees planted to drain it. The Alameda de Hércules, laid out in 1574 on marshy ground just north of the old city walls, is named for the white poplars, álamos in Spanish, planted to help dry and stabilize the reclaimed land, trees used as infrastructure rather than ornament. Poplars still line the central walkway today, though the ones standing now trace only to a major 1764 replanting that added more than 1,600 trees, not to the original 16th-century planting. At both ends of the promenade stand dense stands of London planes, nearly a century old themselves, that have survived every renovation the square has undergone since, including a long twentieth-century decline and its more recent revival as one of Seville's most popular nightlife streets. Two Roman columns, salvaged from a demolished temple, still stand at the promenade's southern entrance, predating every tree here by more than a millennium and giving the Alameda its Hercules name through a 17th-century statue once mounted on top of one of them. Bars and terraces now crowd the same ground the poplars were planted to drain, four and a half centuries after the swamp they replaced.