Valencia protects more monumental and singular trees than any other region in Spain, over 2,400 across the Comunitat Valenciana under a 2006 law, and the city maps five routes past its own share of them. Several of its most-loved trees share an oddly specific origin story: 19th century gardeners meant to plant a magnolia and grabbed a fig sapling by mistake, or a species imported because it had just become fashionable on the French Riviera. What survives from those errors and fashions includes the widest tree canopy in the city, a 400-year-old olive, and the tallest tree in the province.
0 of 31 visited in Valencia
Photo: Joanbanjo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
1
El Titan, the Ficus of the Parterre
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · 174 years · Ciutat Vella
Gardeners planted this fig by accident in 1852, confusing the young sapling for one of the 47 magnolias also going into the newly laid-out Parterre garden that year, the same year Valencia's first railway line opened. The mistake became the city's most celebrated tree. Its trunk now measures nearly 13 metres around, its canopy reaches almost 23 metres high with a spread beyond 35 metres, and the shade it casts covers something close to 1,000 square metres of ground, the widest canopy of any tree in Valencia. It has outlasted a windstorm in 1926 and the catastrophic flood of 1957 that reshaped the whole city's relationship with the Turia river, and in 1915 it became a study subject for Madrid's School of Agricultural Engineers, evidence of how early its scale was recognised as remarkable. For decades it also hosted Sunday sardana dancing and other Valencian cultural gatherings in its shade. A nearby petrol station, whose underground tanks threatened its root system, was finally dismantled in 2020 after years of pressure to protect the tree, valued by the city at some 380,000 euros.
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2
The Olive Tree of La Rambleta
Olive (Olea europaea) · approximately 400 years · San Marcelino, Patraix
This olive has stood through more than a dozen generations of Valencians without ever needing to move, unlike almost every other tree on this list, which the city has planted, transplanted or rescued from demolition at some point in its life. It grows in Parque de la Rambleta, a 14 hectare green space wedged between the San Marcelino neighbourhood and the General Cemetery in the south of the city, among a Mediterranean garden of date palms, Greek olives, cypresses, carob trees and a cedar of Lebanon. City sources place its age at roughly 400 years, without an individually documented planting record, which is typical for old olives generally: the species hollows and re-grows from its own base over centuries, making ring counts unreliable even where felling would be permitted. It is named directly, on the city's own monumental trees route, as the oldest single tree among all five of its mapped trails, a title that puts it ahead of trees standing in far more visited parts of the city.
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Photo: Joanbanjo (CC BY-SA 4.0)
3
The Ginkgo of Jardín de Monforte
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · approximately 170 years · L'Eixample
This ginkgo has survived every conflict Valencia has been through since the mid-19th century simply by belonging to a species built to survive almost anything. Ginkgo biloba is often described as a living fossil, its lineage traceable back some 250 million years, largely unchanged, and famous for its ability to resist fire, disease and pollution better than almost any other large tree. This particular specimen grows in the Jardín de Monforte, a roughly 12,000 square metre neoclassical garden the Marquis of San Juan built from an orchard he bought in 1849, filling it with marble statues, fountains and specimen trees over the following decades. Declared a National Artistic Garden in 1941, it remains the last 19th century historical-artistic garden intact in Valencia, and this ginkgo, planted not long after the garden's founding, is described by the city as the best known of its kind in Valencia. A second, younger female ginkgo grows nearby in the same garden.
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4
The Ficus of the Countess of Ripalda
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · approximately 135 years · Exposicio, El Pla del Real
A garden fashion imported from the French Riviera is the reason this tree exists at all. In 1891, the widowed Countess of Ripalda hired Valencia's head gardener, Fernando Llopis, to lay out the grounds of her new palace, and Llopis suggested a Moreton Bay fig after seeing the species become fashionable among wealthy families on the Cote d'Azur, a garden idea Valencian gardeners of the period regularly borrowed from that stretch of coast given its similar climate. The palace itself did not survive the 20th century, demolished in 1968, and when the demolition crew asked how to remove the tree along with it, head gardener Vicente Peris told them that severe pruning alone would be enough to kill it. He was wrong in the way that mattered: rather than dying, the fig grew stronger, and it now stands alone at the entrance to Plaza Legion Espanola, the sole surviving trace of a palace and garden otherwise erased from the site entirely.
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5
The Holm Oak of Avenida de Aragon
Holm Oak (Quercus ilex) · undated, called centuries-old · Algiros
This oak is the last physical trace of an orchard that vanished under the city growing around it. It once stood on the medieval Camino del Cabanyal, irrigated by the historic Mestalla and Algiros channels that watered Valencia's huerta, the market-garden belt that surrounded the walled city for centuries. Urbanisation swallowed the area from 1902, when the arrival of the railway brought streets and buildings to what had been open orchard, and the tree found itself progressively boxed in: it stood within the grounds of the old Aragon Central railway station until that structure disappeared in 1974, then inside Public Works Ministry land until 1982, when the area around it was finally redeveloped into the landscaped avenue setting it keeps today. It now grows on a traffic island between Avenida de Aragon and Avenida Blasco Ibanez, next to the Mestalla stadium's parking area, a centuries-old survivor of a landscape that otherwise no longer exists anywhere nearby.
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6
Los Tres Amigos
Canary Island Date Palm (Phoenix canariensis) · approximately 100 years · Extramurs
Three palms standing together at the entrance to a single street have become a landmark specific enough to have lent their nickname to nearby shops and a bar. Los Tres Amigos are believed to be the last visible trace of a private estate garden that once stood in this part of Valencia, before the neighbourhood around Plaza de Espana was fully urbanised in the early 20th century, leaving the three Phoenix canariensis specimens standing where a garden wall or gate might once have framed them. Palms of this species can live well over a century, and these are estimated at around a hundred years old, though no individual planting record survives to confirm an exact date. In January 2015 the local Abastos-Finca Roja neighbourhood association formally adopted the trio as a protected ensemble, a grassroots gesture of the kind more often given to a single monumental specimen than to a street corner planting. They remain, in the association's own words, a gateway to the street they mark.
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7
La Mas Delgada del Paseo
Mexican Fan Palm (Washingtonia robusta) · early 20th century planting · Pla del Real
A gardener's mistake left this palm standing taller and thinner than every other one around it. When Jardines del Real, also known as Viveros, was planted with rows of Washingtonia filifera palms in the early 20th century, young Washingtonia robusta saplings, a related but distinct Mexican species that grows noticeably taller and more slender, were mixed in by error, the two species being difficult to tell apart while young. By the time gardeners realised the mix-up, this particular tree had already grown tall enough that removing it would have left an obvious gap, so it was left to keep growing rather than corrected. Decades later, it now rises well above its shorter filifera neighbours along the path dedicated to the Peris family of head gardeners, a slender, singular silhouette visible from some distance across the park, and locally nicknamed simply the thinnest one on the promenade. Jardines del Real itself began as royal grounds attached to a palace demolished in the early 19th century, later reopened as one of the city's main public parks, which is why its formal rows of palms still read as a planned avenue rather than an accidental grove, this one slender exception included.
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8
The Palm of Vicente Peris
Mexican Fan Palm (Washingtonia robusta) · approximately 100 years · Pla del Real
This palm survived being in the way twice, first of traffic and then of a demolition crew, thanks to one head gardener's refusal to let it simply be cut down. It originally grew in the courtyard of a Marist Brothers school at Plaza Mirasol, until the early 1960s, when that building and others nearby were demolished to widen what had been the narrow street of Les Granotes into today's Calle Poeta Querol. Rather than lose the tree, head gardener Vicente Peris asked mayor Adolfo Rincon de Arellano to close the surrounding streets to traffic for a single night, and the palm was loaded onto two trucks and moved under cover of darkness to a new home at the start of Avenida de Aragon, beside La Alameda, where it still stands today. The relocation is documented specifically enough, down to the mayor's name and the two-truck detail, that it reads as verified local history rather than embellished legend, a rare case on this list of a tree's survival being an entirely deliberate human choice rather than an accident of neglect.
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9
The Eucalyptus of Benimamet
River Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) · 80-100 years · Benimamet
At just over 41 metres tall, this eucalyptus is the tallest tree in the province of Valencia and the fourth tallest recorded anywhere in the wider region, a scale confirmed by the city's own maintenance crews, who need aerial platforms and, for its highest branches, help from the fire service just to prune it safely. It grows in the Parc Lineal in Benimamet, on the northwestern edge of the city, next to the tram line that was later routed underground past it, and is formally listed both by the Valencia city council and in the Comunitat Valenciana's own Catálogo de Árboles Monumentales y Singulares, the regional register that protects it by law. Eucalyptus camaldulensis, native to Australia, was planted widely across Mediterranean Spain from the early 20th century onward for its fast growth and tolerance of poor, dry soil, but few specimens anywhere in the region have been left to grow as large as this one. Its trunk runs some 6.1 metres around at the base, with a crown spreading 30 metres wide, dimensions that make it visible well beyond the park it stands in.
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10
The Kashmir Cypress of the Botanical Garden
Kashmir Cypress (Cupressus cashmeriana) · undated · Ciutat Vella
This tree belongs to a species that survives today largely because it has been useful to Buddhist ceremony as much as to botany. Cupressus cashmeriana is the national tree of Bhutan, found wild only in the eastern Himalayas between roughly 1,500 and 2,800 metres of altitude, and it has long been deliberately preserved around Buddhist temples and monasteries even as habitat loss elsewhere pushed it onto international conservation watch lists. Western science only formally described it in 1848, when British botanist William Griffith encountered it in Kashmir and initially misnamed it, before John Forbes Royle corrected the naming to reflect the region where it was first documented. Valencia's specimen grows in the university's Jardí Botanic, one of the oldest botanical gardens in Spain, on Carrer Quart near the city's old medieval walls, its foliage a distinctive bright blue-green among the garden's wider conifer collection. No individual age or planting date is documented for this specimen, so any figure given is a broad estimate rather than a verified record, but the species' own rarity, not its size or age, is what makes it worth including here.
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11
The Ficus of Plaza Centenar de la Ploma
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · roughly 150 to 190 years, undocumented individual planting date · El Carmen, Ciutat Vella
There are two giant figs here, their canopies touching so closely they read as one crown, and only one of them lets you walk up to it. The one in the plaza is this one, and it is not the modest half. It stands 27.8 metres tall with a canopy 28 metres across and a base circumference of 15.6 metres, where aerial roots have come down and fused into secondary trunks. Ficus macrophylla in its columnar form does this, building extra legs for itself until the line between trunk and root stops being obvious.
The measurements do not fully agree. Valencia's municipal tree observatory records 7.68 metres around at chest height; the regional monumental-tree register lists 13.7 metres, almost certainly taken lower on the same fused mass. Both figures are real and neither is wrong.
Its twin stands thirty metres away, inside the walled courtyard of the former Palacio de Raga, now a Generalitat residence for the elderly. Local memory holds that one to be the older of the pair, supposedly a gift from the botanist Cavanilles to Francisco Martinez de la Raga, which would put it well past two hundred years. No planting date is documented for either. Both belong to the wave of Australian figs Valencia planted from the 1850s, the same fashion that produced El Titan across town.
The plaza tree is fenced at the base to keep feet off the root plate. Everything above that is open to anyone crossing the square.
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12
The Ficus of the Alameditas de Serranos
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · undated; garden itself dates to 1830 but no individual planting record for this tree survives · El Carmen, Ciutat Vella
This promenade was a leather-tanning ground before it was a garden. In 1830 the Baron de Herves laid out the Alameditas de Serranos as two tree-lined walks flanking the Serranos gate, on ground previously used for curing hides, and the staircases either side of the gate followed in 1837. The fig that grows there now is the smallest of Valencia's registered monumental figs, and not by a little: 6.2 metres around, against the 9.3 to 13.8 metres of the giants in the Parterre, the Glorieta and the Palacio de Raga. It is still large enough that the city had to send crews in 2022 to cut it back where its branches had grown into the traffic.
Nobody knows when it went in. The garden dates from 1830, which is the only firm ceiling anyone has, and no individual record for this tree survives, which is why the age range given here is as wide as it is.
There is also a contradiction worth stating rather than smoothing over. At least one survey of the Alameditas says the promenade holds nothing of particular age or botanical interest beyond an Acacia farnesiana. The regional catalogue, meanwhile, lists this fig as a protected singular tree, a legal designation under the Valencian tree law of 2006 that requires meeting specific criteria. The register is the stronger evidence. The disagreement is real all the same.
It stands at the foot of the Torres de Serranos, the old city gate.
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13
The First Ficus of the Glorieta
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · undated for this specific specimen; the Glorieta's ficus were planted across the 1850s-60s and sources say each has a different estimated age · Ciutat Vella
In 1957 the Turia flood came close to putting this tree's crown under water. The Glorieta sits low beside the Palace of Justice, and the flood that permanently changed Valencia's relationship with its river ran deep enough here that the garden's giant figs were nearly submerged. All three of them came through it.
Three is the number that matters. The Glorieta holds three Ficus macrophylla, catalogued individually, and this is the first of the set, with a trunk 9.7 metres around. They are not triplets: sources on the group state plainly that each of the three carries a different estimated age, and none of them assigns a figure to this one. What is agreed is the era. The planting belongs to the 1850s and 1860s, when Valencia was filling its new public gardens with Australian figs, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not.
Fifty-five metres away, across the street in the Parterre, stands El Titan, which went into the ground in 1852 because a gardener took a fig sapling for one of the 47 magnolias he was supposed to be planting. The same error is recorded on this side of the road, in the same batch of work, by the same hands.
So do not treat this as a lesser copy of the more famous tree. It is the other half of a walk that takes about a minute: two separately named gardens, one origin story, and four enormous figs between them.
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14
The Caucasian Elm of the Botanic Garden
Caucasian Elm (Zelkova carpinifolia) · undated, no planting record found · Ciutat Vella
At roughly 33 metres, this is one of the tallest things growing in Valencia's botanic garden, and it belongs to a species most visitors have never heard of. Zelkova carpinifolia comes from the forests of the southern Caucasus and northern Iran. It is an elm relative that grows a short trunk and then breaks into a dense sheaf of near-vertical branches, so the crown reads more like a bundle held upright than a spreading canopy.
Its trunk measures 5.3 metres around at chest height. That is the figure in the regional register, and an independent field measurement taken in April 2014 put it at 5.27 metres, which is about as close as two separate people with tape measures ever get.
Its age is not recorded anywhere. The garden moved to this site, the old Huerto de Tramoieres outside the medieval wall, in 1802, which sets a ceiling and nothing more. Beyond the register entry and that one measurement, this tree has almost no paper trail: no newspaper feature, no garden monograph, no planting note. For a tree this size that is unusual, and it is better said out loud than filled in with a plausible number.
It shares the garden with the Kashmir Cypress, and one modest entrance fee covers both. In autumn the whole crown turns orange-brown, which is the species' best-known feature after its shape.
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15
The Palm of the Palacio de Pineda
Canary Island Date Palm (Phoenix canariensis) · undated; palace itself built 1728-1731 but no record found of when the palm was planted · El Carmen, Ciutat Vella
You can order a coffee under this one. The Palacio de Pineda was built between 1728 and 1731 for Francisco Salvador Pineda, and its walled rear courtyard, laid out as a private garden, now works as the terrace of a cafe inside a public university campus. A single Canary Island Date Palm stands at the centre of it, listed in the regional catalogue of monumental and singular trees, with tables arranged around its base.
How old it is, nobody knows. The palace has a construction date to the year and the palm has nothing at all. No planting record turned up in any source, and the catalogue entry confirms only that it is large enough and notable enough to be protected. Palms are difficult to age in any case: there are no growth rings to count, and the trunk reaches close to its final thickness early and then mostly just gets taller. Anything from eighty years to two and a half centuries is defensible here, which is a long way of saying the number is unknown.
The building has housed the Valencia seat of the UIMP, a Spanish public university, since the early 1990s, and that is the only reason the courtyard is open at all. For the two and a half centuries before that it was somebody's private garden, and this palm was standing in it while the door stayed shut.
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16
The Bottle Tree of the Botanic Garden
Silk Floss Tree (Ceiba speciosa) · Ciutat Vella
Break open one of this tree's seed pods and you get a handful of pillow stuffing. The green capsules of Ceiba speciosa split to release a mass of white floss, light and water repellent, which was collected to stuff pillows and mattresses and to insulate against heat and cold. That is why Valencia knows the species as the arbol de la lana, the wool tree, alongside the older local name choricia.
Everything else about it is built to stop you touching it. The trunk swells into a barrel and narrows again above, the bark is smooth, greenish and finely striated because it photosynthesises, and the lower stem is studded with hard conical thorns. The species comes from the seasonally dry forests of South America, drops its leaves and grows fast, which is how a tree with no planting record has reached 5.03 metres around and 32.1 metres tall. Of the trees the regional register measures in this garden, only the Caucasian Elm a short walk away carries a thicker trunk.
Nobody has dated it. The register takes its measurements and stops, and the garden's own writers describe the species without giving this specimen a year. If you know when it went in, tell us.
It stands inside the university's botanic garden, behind a small entrance fee that also covers the Kashmir Cypress and the Caucasian Elm.
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17
The Virginia Oak of the Botanic Garden
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · Ciutat Vella
This oak keeps its leaves through winter, and its timber was once worth more to a navy than to a carpenter. Quercus virginiana grows along the American south coast from Virginia to Texas, evergreen and exceptionally dense, and shipwrights sought it out for the curved frames of wooden warships because the natural bends of the wood already matched the shape of a hull. In its own range it feeds people as well. The acorns can be pressed for oil, and the roots swell into edible tubers.
Valencia's specimen stands near the entrance of the university's botanic garden, which makes it one of the first trees you pass and one of the easiest to walk straight past. The register gives it a girth of 3.69 metres, a height of 32.6 metres and a crown 20.1 metres across. That is a tall, upright figure for a species better known in Georgia and Louisiana for going sideways, throwing horizontal limbs out over a road until they touch the ground.
Its age is not recorded. The garden has stood on this ground since 1802, the old Huerto de Tramoieres outside the medieval wall, which sets a ceiling and nothing more. Neither the register nor the garden's own writers put a year on this tree. If you know one, tell us.
Entry to the garden is paid, a modest fee that covers the whole collection.
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18
The Plane Tree of the Botanic Garden
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · Ciutat Vella
No tree in this garden throws a bigger shadow. The plane standing against the botanic garden's western wall spreads a crown 26 metres across, wider than any other tree the regional register measures here, over a trunk 4.16 metres around and 31.4 metres of height. In a city that spends five months of the year hunting for shade, that is the entire appeal, and the garden's own writers single it out for casting the deepest shade in the collection.
Planes carry a reputation in Spanish cities as an allergy tree, and the same writers push back on it in this tree's case, calling the worry overstated.
Platanus x acerifolia is a hybrid, planted across Europe since the seventeenth century precisely because it does this: grow fast, tolerate bad air and compacted ground, shed its bark in plates and produce a heavy canopy within a few decades. Which is also why nobody bothered to write down when this one was planted. The register measures it and gives no year, the garden's catalogue names the species and not the date, and the tree itself is not telling. If a planting record exists, we would like to see it.
It sits at the far western side of the garden, past the Silk Floss Tree, and the walk between the two takes about a minute.
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19
The Cretan Pine of the Botanic Garden
Turkish Pine (Pinus brutia) · Ciutat Vella
Beekeepers know this species better than gardeners do. Pinus brutia draws bees that produce a honey people actively seek out, and its timber is fine enough for luxury furniture, which is a strange pair of credentials for a tree standing quietly in a university collection.
What gets it onto the monumental register is the trunk. It runs 30.1 metres straight up, 3.39 metres around at the base, carrying a comparatively narrow crown of 17.3 metres. The word the garden's own writers use is rectilinear, and it is the right one. Old Mediterranean pines usually lean, fork or flatten themselves into an umbrella against the wind. This one went up like a mast and stopped.
The species comes from Crete, western Turkey and the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean, which is why Spanish signage calls it the pino de Creta while English usage has settled on Turkish Pine. It is a close relative of the Aleppo Pine growing wild all along this coastline, and the two are separated by needle length and by the way the cones sit on the branch, which is worth knowing if you are trying to tell them apart on a walk.
No age is recorded for it. The register carries measurements and no dates, and no planting note for this tree has surfaced anywhere else, so how long it has been standing here is genuinely unknown. If you know, tell us.
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20
The Hartwiss Oak of the Botanic Garden
Hartwiss Oak (Quercus hartwissiana) · Ciutat Vella
Most people will never see this oak growing anywhere, including in the countries it comes from. Quercus hartwissiana has a narrow natural range around the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea coast into western Asia, and it is scarce in cultivation. The name honours Nicolai von Hartwiss, the Russian botanist who worked on the plants of that region in the nineteenth century.
Valencia has one, and it is not a token specimen. It stands 33.4 metres tall on a trunk 3.06 metres around, with a crown just under 22 metres wide. That is a slim stem carrying a lot of height, the shape of a tree that grew up with close neighbours rather than out in the open.
It lives in the Escola Botanica, the teaching collection at the centre of the university's garden, where trees are arranged by botanical family rather than by how they look, and the garden's own catalogue lists it there under the Valencian name Roure d'Hartwiss. That is what a collection like this is for: species you cannot see anywhere else, planted for study and then left alone long enough to turn into something worth walking to.
Nobody has dated it. The register measures it, the catalogue names it, and neither offers a year or a planting note. If you know when this oak went in, tell us.
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21
The Australian Pine of the Botanic Garden
River She-oak (Casuarina cunninghamiana) · Ciutat Vella
The garden files this tree under pino australiano, and it is not a pine. Casuarina cunninghamiana is a flowering tree from the river valleys of eastern Australia whose leaves have shrunk to rings of tiny scales along long green jointed branchlets. From ten metres away it reads as a drooping conifer. Up close there is not a needle on it, and nothing else in this garden resembles it.
At 33.6 metres it is one of the tallest trees here, on a trunk 3.49 metres round carrying a narrow crown of 18.4 metres. In Australia the species is planted to hold riverbanks together, its roots fixing nitrogen in poor sandy soil. Here it stands in the Escola Botanica among the teaching collection, doing nothing more useful than being large and strange.
One caveat, stated plainly. The Generalitat's monumental tree register maps this individual trunk with its own entry, coordinates and measurements. The garden's own catalogue confirms that the species grows in this collection, but that page describes the species rather than this particular tree, so the second source corroborates what it is and not which trunk it is. On the ground it is hard to mistake, because a Casuarina looks like nothing around it. We would rather say this than imply a confirmation we do not have.
No age is recorded for it anywhere.
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22
The Second Ficus of the Glorieta
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · roughly 170 years, if it belongs to the group planted in 1852 · Ciutat Vella
The biggest trunk in the Glorieta measures 11.35 metres around, and it belongs to a tree that may have been planted by mistake. Valencia put four Australian figs into these two adjoining gardens in 1852, and the account told about them locally is that the saplings arrived mixed into a delivery of magnolias and went into the ground before anyone identified what they were. This is the largest of the three standing in the Glorieta, and the second largest of the four overall, after El Titan across the road in the Parterre.
Its crown is the widest in this garden, 39.5 metres of canopy over a tree 27.5 metres high, which in practice means a ceiling of leathery evergreen leaves that stays dark at midday in August. Ficus macrophylla comes from the coastal forests of New South Wales and Queensland and drops aerial roots that fuse and thicken into buttresses, which is how a trunk figure like 11.35 metres gets assembled in under two centuries.
The 1852 date is documented for the group of four rather than for this tree individually, and other accounts hold that the four are not all the same age, so read roughly 170 years as the era and not the birthday. What is not in question is what it has stood through: the Civil War, and the 1957 Turia flood, which rose in the Glorieta far enough to threaten these crowns.
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23
The Third Ficus of the Glorieta
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · roughly 170 years, if it belongs to the group planted in 1852 · Ciutat Vella
The smallest of Valencia's four great figs still has a trunk two people cannot reach around. This is the third Ficus macrophylla of the Glorieta, 4.95 metres in girth and 18.1 metres tall, with a crown spreading 27.8 metres, half as wide again as the tree is high. In most cities that is the headline tree on the page. Here it is the modest member of a family that includes a specimen with a 13.8-metre trunk on the other side of the road.
All four went in together in 1852, in the planting that gave the Parterre and the Glorieta their Australian figs. Why this one stayed smaller is not written down anywhere, and it is the sort of question somebody holding the garden's old plans could probably answer: root space, water, paving and where the drains run all differ across a garden barely a hundred metres across.
That 1852 date belongs to the group. No source dates this tree on its own, and accounts that have looked at the four say they are not all of an age, so the honest figure here is an era rather than a number.
It stands at the eastern end of the Glorieta, the furthest of the three from the Palace of Justice, and unlike the university's botanic garden across town it costs nothing to walk up to and stand under.
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24
The Mexican White Oak of the Botanic Garden
Mexican White Oak (Quercus polymorpha) · Ciutat Vella
Quercus polymorpha barely counts as a North American oak. Its range runs through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, and it crosses into the United States only once, in a single wild stand roughly 30 kilometres north of the Rio Grande in Texas. Everywhere else it grows, it grows on purpose: gardeners prize it for holding its leaves through most of a mild winter and for shrugging off heat that would strip a European oak bare.
The regional register lists Valencia's specimen as the Alzina de Mexic del Botanic, girth 3.44 metres and a crown 25.2 metres across, nearly as wide as the tree is tall at 26.5 metres. That crown is doing the work here: this is a garden oak built for shade rather than height, a wide flat canopy over one of the botanic garden's paths.
Nobody has dated it, and no second source beyond the regional catalogue has turned up to confirm the measurements, though that catalogue is the same body responsible for every monumental and singular tree the region records. If you know when it was planted, or have stood under it, tell us.
It grows in the university's botanic garden, the same paid-entry collection as the Silk Floss Tree and the Virginia Oak nearby.
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25
La Carcasa
Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera) · Ciutat Vella
A date palm is supposed to grow one trunk. This one grows more than 35, all rising from a single base and splitting again as they climb, until the whole plant reads less like a tree than like something caught mid-explosion. That is exactly where the name comes from: a carcasa is the spent casing of a firework shell, the part left behind after the burst, and whoever named this palm had clearly stood underneath one before.
Phoenix dactylifera is the ordinary date palm grown across the Mediterranean and the Middle East for its fruit, and it only branches like this under unusual conditions, typically when an injury to the growing tip forces several new shoots to compete for the top rather than one taking over cleanly. Valencia's specimen has kept doing it long enough and thoroughly enough that the university's own botanic garden calls it the most special palm on the grounds, ahead of trees twice its height nearby.
No age is recorded for it. The regional register that measures the garden's monumental trees left the girth column blank too, which makes sense for a trunk this divided; a single number would not describe it honestly.
It grows in the Jardi Botanic de la Universitat de Valencia, a ten minute walk from Angel Guimera metro station, behind the same small entrance fee that covers the Kashmir Cypress and the Bottle Tree.
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26
The Second Bottle Tree of the Botanic Garden
Bottle Tree (Brachychiton populneus) · Ciutat Vella
This is the garden's second 'bottle tree', and it barely resembles the first. The regional register lists it as Arbre botella del Botanic II, right behind the Silk Floss Tree that carries the same nickname and the Roman numeral I. The two share only that name. This one is a Kurrajong, Brachychiton populneus, from eastern Australia, related to the true bottle trees whose trunks swell dramatically into a barrel, but keeping a slimmer, more upright shape of its own.
The garden's own virtual catalogue confirms which tree is which: this individual is listed under braquiquito, the Spanish name for Brachychiton populneus specifically, held in the Escola Botanica collection, matching the register's species assignment. Worth stating plainly, because more than one Brachychiton grows here and the shared nickname alone would not tell you which is which.
At 30.1 metres tall on a trunk 2.88 metres round, with a crown spreading 13.8 metres, it is a solid, upright tree, thinner through the trunk than its barrel-shaped namesake nearby. No age or planting record survives for it anywhere. If you know when it went in, tell us.
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The Pecan of the Botanic Garden
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · Ciutat Vella
The regional register calls this tree an American walnut, and that is close but not quite right. Carya illinoinensis is a pecan, in the same family as the true walnuts but a different genus, native to the river valleys of the American South. The garden's own catalogue lists it under three names at once, pacana, pecan and nogal americano, and places it in both the Bosque and the Escola Botanica collections.
It is already a serious tree: 32.9 metres tall on a trunk 3.88 metres round, with a crown 16.1 metres across, large enough to earn its own entry in the region's monumental tree register. And yet the garden's own catalogue puts the species' full mature height nearer 50 metres in its native range, which means this specimen, whatever its age, still has real growing left to do.
No planting record survives for it. The register measures the trunk and stops there; the garden's catalogue confirms the species grows in this collection but describes it in general rather than naming this individual tree by a date. It stands in the Bosque, a short walk from the Plane Tree, taller than that tree but carrying a far narrower crown, 16.1 metres against the Plane's 26.
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The Persimmon of the Botanic Garden
Common Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) · Ciutat Vella
This tree cannot fruit by itself. Diospyros virginiana is dioecious, meaning each individual is either male or female, and only a female growing near a male will set fruit at all. The garden's own catalogue confirms the point and adds a use: the ripe orange fruit gets made into compotes locally, once it has softened past the sharp astringency the unripe fruit is known for.
The species is native to the eastern United States. Valencia's specimen has reached 30.3 metres on a trunk 2.21 metres round, the slimmest trunk among the botanic garden's cluster of tall trees, with a narrow 10.8 metre crown to match, more upright than spreading.
No planting record survives for it. The regional register lists it as a protected singular tree and measures the trunk; the garden's catalogue confirms the species grows in the Escola Botanica collection but, like its neighbours in this cluster, names the species rather than dating this individual. If you know when it went in, tell us.
It grows a short walk from the Caucasian Elm and the Hartwiss Oak, in the same teaching collection where the university groups its trees by family rather than by size.
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The Norfolk Pine of Vila de Sant Josep
Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla) · Burjassot (a separate municipality bordering Valencia, about 4.3 km / roughly 15 minutes by Metrovalencia Line 1 from the city centre; day-trip distance, not inside Valencia proper)
Burjassot has two officially monumental trees, and one of them is dead. That leaves this Norfolk Island pine, 32.5 metres of it, standing on the open ground in front of the town's metro station.
Height alone is what protected it. Burjassot's municipal sustainability office put the tree forward in 2011, and the regional government's technicians concluded that it qualified solo por existir, by its scale alone, as the local paper reported at the time. The trunk is 2.6 metres round and the crown just 7.4 metres wide, which is the shape of the species: a straight mast carrying branches in flat, even tiers. Araucaria heterophylla is not a pine, and it is not from anywhere near here. It comes from Norfolk Island, a single speck of land in the South Pacific.
It grows in the grounds of the Vila de Sant Josep, a mansion built for the Basque industrialist Julian Maestre Tome, taken over by the Colegio San Jose in 1918 and seized by the Republic in 1934. Those dates belong to the building. Nobody has dated the tree, and if you know when it went in, tell us.
One thing to be clear about: Burjassot is a separate municipality rather than a Valencia neighbourhood. It sits 4.3 km out, about fifteen minutes on Metrovalencia line 1, and the tree is right at the station.
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The Canary Palm of Gran Via
Canary Island Date Palm (Phoenix canariensis) · Gran Via / Pla del Remei
The beetle killing palms along this avenue prefers this palm's species. In February 2026 local reporting counted ten date palms on the Gran Via del Marques del Turia sick or dead from red palm weevil, and pointed out that the insect's favourite host in Valencia is not the date palm at all but Phoenix canariensis, which is exactly what this tree is. No source names this palm as infested, and the regional register still carried it after that report went out. Worth knowing before you make the trip.
What you go for is a Canary Island date palm 24.4 metres tall on a trunk 2.15 metres round, growing on the planted median of a city avenue and individually designated a natural monument, which is not a status Valencia hands out to ordinary street planting. The avenue's better known monumental trees are its Moreton Bay figs, four of which the council was still pruning in 2023. The palm gets less attention.
The Gran Via was laid out in 1884 and landscaped in 1907. Whether this palm belongs to that planting, nobody has written down, and the two dates are the avenue's rather than the tree's. Palms carry no growth rings, which makes them hard to age even when somebody tries. If you know how old it is, tell us.
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The Fig of the Hort de les Camelies
Moreton Bay Fig (Ficus macrophylla) · Aiora (Ayora)
A trunk of 10.95 metres puts this fig in the same weight class as El Titan and the giants of the Glorieta. It grows in neither. It stands in the Hort de les Camelies, a small public garden in the Aiora district, 3.3 km east of the centre and well clear of the cluster of famous figs downtown.
Ficus macrophylla builds sideways rather than up, and this one holds to type: 22 metres tall under a crown 31 metres across, nine metres wider than the tree is high. A canopy that size over a small neighbourhood garden is most of the experience of the place.
The garden belongs to the city's parks and gardens department and costs nothing to walk into. It is not manicured. Residents writing about it in January 2024 complained about its upkeep and described a palm there eaten out by weevil; the fig itself they left alone.
Nobody has dated it. The register measures the trunk and stops there, and no planting record for the garden has surfaced. If you know, tell us.
One warning worth carrying with you: the Jardi d'Aiora, 300 metres away, has its own group of old ficus and its own history of fallen trees. It is a different garden, and this tree is not in it.
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