The Yew of the Paraninfo

There is one yew in Zaragoza's register of singular trees, and this is it. The catalogue gives its reason for protection as the species being very uncommon in the city, which is a polite way of saying that a tree of cool wet northern churchyards has no business in a place that spends August above thirty five degrees. It is thirteen metres tall and one metre twenty round, and it is one of a pair, both male, so neither will ever carry the red berries that yews are known for. What they stand in front of is Ricardo Magdalena's Faculty of Medicine and Sciences, projected in 1886 and inaugurated on 18 October 1893, a building of brick and ceramic in a deliberately Aragonese key that now serves as the university's ceremonial hall, its general library and its natural sciences museum. Local tradition holds that these two yews are survivors of an older botanical garden on this ground, and that would make them older than everything around them. It is a good story and the evidence for it is thin, so treat it as a story. Yews are slow, dense and long lived, and this one is doing something its species is not built for.