The London Plane of Calle Asalto

The street is named after the thing that happened to it. In February 1809 French troops finally broke into Zaragoza through the medieval wall along this line, ending a second siege that had cost the city tens of thousands of lives and had been conducted, by the end, house by house. A stretch of that wall still stands opposite this tree. The plane itself is two metres eighty round at chest height and seventeen metres tall, growing out of a pavement beside a busy road, and the city's catalogue lists its single reason for protection as size. It carries large pruning stubs where structural branches were taken off, which is what happens to a big tree on a narrow street. London plane is a hybrid that has never been found growing wild, and it became the standard European street tree for one reason: it sheds its bark in plates, and with the bark goes the soot, which mattered enormously in a nineteenth century city and still matters here. Stand with your back to the wall the French came through, and the tree is the older-looking of the two things in front of you.