Every June, the neighbourhood association wraps this fig in fireproof tarps before setting fire to the plaza around it.
Fig
Ficus sp.
A fig this size stops being a single trunk and becomes a structure. We map 7 of them, in 7 cities.
Nago's Hinpun Gajumaru is the clearest case: its aerial roots fused into a mass nearly 12 metres around, old enough to have gradually swallowed a pine growing beside it. The Philippine balete is a strangler fig that starts in another tree's branches and replaces it; the Millennium Tree in Maria Aurora is a cage of fused roots around a hollow you can stand inside, and on Siquijor a spring rises at the roots of the Enchanted Balete of Lazi. Rio de Janeiro's fig on Rua Faro became the city's first landmarked tree in 1980, after neighbours stood under it to stop a construction crew. Alicante's is wrapped in fireproof tarps every June before the plaza around it is set alight for the Fogueres festival. None has been keyed to an exact species.
Alicante
Palma de Mallorca
A reader sent us this one, and it is a better find than anything on our list for this stretch of the seafront.
Rio de Janeiro
In 1980 this fig became the first tree the city of Rio ever landmarked, and it took a protest in the street to get there.
Maria Aurora
You can stand inside this tree.
Siquijor
A spring rises at the roots of this tree.
Maxaranguape
At the right hour of the morning this tree throws a shadow shaped like a heart, which is how a fig on a beach north of Natal became the Árvore do Amor, the Tree of Love.
Nago
Okinawa's only railway, the Naha monorail, does not reach anywhere near this tree, and yet it is one of the most visited individual trees on the island.
Photo: Shig ISO from Fuchu,Tokyo, Japan (CC BY 2.0)
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