The Ficus of the Corts Valencianes

One of the largest fig trees in Valencia grows in a garden you can enter twice a week, by appointment, and not at all in August. It stands in the courtyard of the Palau de Benicarlo, also known as the Palau dels Borja, which is the working seat of the Corts Valencianes, the Valencian regional parliament. The only way to stand under it is the free guided tour of the building, offered on Monday and Friday mornings and booked in advance through the parliament itself. The tour runs about an hour and spends most of it on the debating chamber rather than the garden, which is worth knowing before you go. The tree is in the same weight class as the city's famous ones. The regional register measures its trunk at 13.6 metres around, within centimetres of El Titan in the Parterre. Its age is disputed. One account calls it simply a century old, 22 metres tall with a crown spreading more than 12 metres. Another dates its origins to the second half of the nineteenth century, which would make it something between 127 and 176. Both figures are in circulation and neither has a planting record behind it. So this is the least casual visit on the list, and the only tree here that requires a phone call. It also spends its life inside a security perimeter, tended by a government that lists it as one of the region's monumental trees.