El Titan, the Ficus of the Parterre

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.