Plaça de Cort. Town hall square. And the thing in the middle of it, with the trunk that looks like it's been melted and then thought better of it, is an olive tree about six hundred years old.
Get close to the trunk, because Mallorcans have been finding faces in it for decades. There's a hollow near the base that the whole island knows as the ear — s'orella, the ear of Mallorca — and once somebody points it out you cannot see anything else.
The tree did not grow here.
It grew for six centuries on a farm up in the mountains above Pollença, quietly making olives for people who had no idea anyone would ever come looking for it. Then, in nineteen eighty-nine, the city dug it up, put it on a truck, drove it down out of the Tramuntana, and replanted it in front of the town hall as a symbol of peace. Seven metres of ancient tree, moved sixty kilometres, because a committee thought the square needed one.
Moving a six-hundred-year-old olive is not a gardening job. The root ball has to trave
l with it, the crown gets cut back hard so the tree isn't trying to feed leaves it can no longer supply, and then you wait two or three years to find out whether you've killed it.
It survived. Olives are almost impossible to kill — you can burn one to the ground and it will come back from the root — and this one has now spent about thirty-five years being photographed by roughly everybody who wal
