The ahuehuete of the Parterre of the Retiro park, located near the entrance of the Puerta de Felipe IV, a specimen of about 390 years and shaped like a chandelier due to the arrangement of its branches, is no longer the oldest tree in the capital and has left the position to a 627-year-old olive tree recently transplanted by the Madrid City Council.
The specimen comes from Carabaña, a town in Madrid located 43 kilometers from the capital, in the southeast of the region.
"For two years work has been done on the root system to force the tree to take out new roots," the director-curator of the Jardines del Buen Retiro, Caridad Melgarejo, told Telemadrid.
"Now it is very pruned, but it will gradually recover its volume," Melgarejo assured about the olive tree, which has a trunk three meters in perimeter and was replanted a few weeks ago in the vicinity of the Plaza del Ángel Caído in the Retiro park, within the framework of a European initiative against deforestation, reports Efe.
The tree recovery plan that the Madrid City Council is developing in the Jardines del Buen Retiro includes the planting of 450 new specimens to alleviate the havoc caused by the Philomena storm in this green space at the beginning of 2021.
About the ahuehuete considered until now the oldest tree in the Retiro Park and in the capital, they say that in the War of Independence the French troops installed an artillery piece in its crotch, perhaps this being the reason why this tree was respected , when most of his contemporaries were devastated when the French installed their headquarters in the Retiro, according to the book 'Singular Trees of Madrid', by Antonio López Lillo and Francisco Javier Cantero Desmartines.
