The Holm Oak of Avenida de Aragon

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.