What is the oldest tree in Zaragoza?
Nobody has established it, and the reason is unusually specific: the Ayuntamiento's catalogue of the city's 57 singular trees measures every one of them and dates none of them. The best-supported candidates all stand in Parque Bruil, on ground that was laid out as private gardens after Juan Bruil bought the estate in 1842, which would put them at roughly 150 to 180 years. The hackberry there is the only tree in the city with any public age claim attached to it, and that claim is simply that it is centennial.
This is a gap in the sources rather than in the trees. Spain has no national register of monumental trees; the instrument that exists in Aragon is the regional catalogue of arboles singulares, and it holds 45 trees across the whole region and not one inside the municipality of Zaragoza, because it is a rural conservation tool rather than an urban one. The city's own catalogue, published as a 187 page book in 2006 and given legal force in 2013 when the Ordenanza de Proteccion del Arbolado Urbano listed the same trees in Section IV of its municipal register, is therefore the only document that covers them. It carries a per-tree field for girth at the base, girth at 1.30 metres, trunk height, total height, crown diameter, neighbourhood, street-level position, conservation state and even the legal owner, and it carries no field for age. Where a date exists at all it arrives sideways, in the free-text notes: the honey locusts along Paseo Echegaray are put at the 1890s, and a privately owned cypress at Juslibol at about 300 years on the word of its owner. There is a second and harder caution.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.