The tree came first.
Stone Pine
The stone pine is the tree that gives the Mediterranean skyline its flat topped silhouette, and it normally does that from a bare trunk ten or fifteen metres up, spreading wider than it grows tall. This page maps every stone pine on the site, 14 so far across 11 cities.
The one on Florence's Bobolino hillside ignores the rule and stands 31.5 metres. Two on a Setubal street are older than the street, left over from woodland the city expanded across, which is why they stand in no pattern at all. Istanbul's Ata Fistik Cami gave a whole hill its name and was brought there from the Aegean rather than growing there naturally. Naples has the odd one out: the pine above Mergellina was arguably the most photographed tree on earth for a century, and the tree standing on that hillside now was planted in 1995 in place of the original. Six cities so far, eight trees.
Barcelona
A supercomputer lives in the chapel these pines grew up beside.
Florence
Florence's Renaissance gardens get all the attention; this pine grows in a very different kind of park.
Stone pines are known for their width, not their height.
Madrid
Photo: Cenaida (CC BY 4.0)
This stone pine grows half hidden among shrubs near a small hermitage called the Casa del Cura, the priest's house, in a park built for a duchess rather than a king.
Naples
The Pine of PosillipoYoung replacement
For roughly a century, one pine tree on a hillside above Mergellina was arguably the single most photographed tree on earth, framed against the Bay of Naples and Vesuvius in postcards, oil painting...
Seville
Queen María Cristina had a garden opened in her name on 24 July 1830, and a local gardens association names this pine, in bed 15, as a tree of that founding period.
The city's 2022 survey rates this stone pine's condition as optimal across every measure it takes: physiology, structure and plant health all clean, no biological agent recorded.
Geneva
A Mediterranean umbrella pine has no obvious business on Lake Geneva, and this one is thriving.
Guimaraes
This pine is as wide as it is tall and it stands in the middle of a roundabout.
Sorrento
In 2014 the WWF called the pines of Villa Fondi the last of their kind left standing in the built-up area on the tufa slope of Piano di Sorrento, and objected to a plan to cut them back hard.
Cordoba
Santa Maria de Trassierra is a village in the hills above Cordoba, and this stone pine is one of the specimens the city's own catalogue of singular trees reaches out beyond the city walls to include.
Setubal
These two were here before the street was.
Istanbul
The tree that gave a hill its name is not originally from this hill.
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