The Ficus of Plaza Centenar de la Ploma

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.