The Plane Tree of Parque da Liberdade

Sintra's park changed its name overnight and this tree didn't notice. Portuguese record keepers classified it as a tree of public interest in 1951, decades before 25 April 1974, when thousands of Sintra's own residents flooded this same municipal garden to celebrate the end of the dictatorship and the park was renamed Parque da Liberdade, Liberty Park, that same year. The tree itself, a London plane with a trunk measuring nearly ten metres around at its base, had already been growing for a century by then, planted sometime in the early to mid-1800s depending on which record you trust: the official government register puts it at roughly 200 years old, while a local history blog's own measurements suggest closer to 150. Either figure makes it one of the thickest plane trees documented anywhere in Portugal, rivalled mainly by a single private specimen near Figueira da Foz. Locals just call it the Platano Gigante, the giant plane, and treat the ground beneath it as one more park bench, shaded regardless of the hour by a canopy that has had a century and a half, at minimum, to fill in.