The First Ficus of the Glorieta

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.