The Windmill Palm of the Inner Wall

Fifteen metres is tall for a windmill palm, a species that usually tops out well under that in cultivation. This one grows at a corner of the Alcázar's inner wall, its trunk wrapped in the dense fibrous mat the species never sheds, which gave it enough cold tolerance to become one of the few palms that survives outdoors as far north as the British Isles. The city's 2022 survey rated it optimal on every measure it records: physiology, structure and plant health all clean, no biological agent noted. Trachycarpus fortunei comes from mountain forests in central China, considerably cooler and wetter than Seville, and it reached European gardens in the nineteenth century as one of the first palms hardy enough for a temperate climate rather than a Mediterranean one, which makes its presence inside a mudéjar palace garden built centuries before its arrival a small piece of that later horticultural history folded into an old wall. The coordinate is the catalogue's own; inside the Alcázar's walled, ticketed grounds the named corner does more of the work than the pin.