The Palm of the Palacio de Pineda

You can order a coffee under this one. The Palacio de Pineda was built between 1728 and 1731 for Francisco Salvador Pineda, and its walled rear courtyard, laid out as a private garden, now works as the terrace of a cafe inside a public university campus. A single Canary Island Date Palm stands at the centre of it, listed in the regional catalogue of monumental and singular trees, with tables arranged around its base. How old it is, nobody knows. The palace has a construction date to the year and the palm has nothing at all. No planting record turned up in any source, and the catalogue entry confirms only that it is large enough and notable enough to be protected. Palms are difficult to age in any case: there are no growth rings to count, and the trunk reaches close to its final thickness early and then mostly just gets taller. Anything from eighty years to two and a half centuries is defensible here, which is a long way of saying the number is unknown. The building has housed the Valencia seat of the UIMP, a Spanish public university, since the early 1990s, and that is the only reason the courtyard is open at all. For the two and a half centuries before that it was somebody's private garden, and this palm was standing in it while the door stayed shut.