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Date Published: 22/09/2023

Aguilas ficus trees pass their annual check-up

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The enormous trees in the town centre need to be cared for and pruned regularly

Aguilas ficus trees pass their annual check-up

As they do every year, the large, iconic Ficus trees in the Plaza de España in Águilas have undergone a health check.

According to the local Councillor for Parks and Gardens, José Luis Moreno Salas, “Every year, two inspections are carried out to check the health of the trees and to clean up the branches with pruning.”

The work has been carried out by European-certified operators who, manually, using a lifting platform, have carried out this task branch by branch on each of the ficus trees which preside over the four corners of the Plaza de España in Águilas.

Earlier this month, one of these trees, which is over 100 years old, had to be fenced off in order to prevent pedestrians from slipping and falling on the natural sap that was seeping from the tree.

The system used to give the trees their annual check-up is known as EVA (‘Evaluación Visual del Arbolado’ or Visual Tree Evaluation in English) and seeks to detect possible problems in the specimens. Among the work carried out is the inspection of possible dry or unstable branches which could fall and cause problems, as well as undue growth and trunk measurements.

Evaluators also try to ensure the correct growth of the exposed roots so that they reach the ground correctly. The checks will be carried out in three or four days and are part of the work that is carried out twice a year (once at the beginning of the year and again now) on all the trees known as “singular trees” in the municipality.

In addition to these routine checks, visual checks are carried out throughout the year and action is taken when there is evidence of any possible problem, as well as after particularly strong gusts of wind which may have altered the state of the trees.

In this respect, the Councillor for Parks and Gardens assured that “the Águilas Town Hall prioritises, above all else, the safety of its residents and takes care of the different specimens that we have in the municipality and which form our living monumental heritage.”

The ficus trees of Águilas’s Glorieta have been the subject of many hypotheses, but the exact date of their planting is unknown. Some claim that they were brought over from Brazil by the British missionary Leon Armstrong, though municipal archivist, Pepi Navarro has carried out a rigorous investigation, consulting various documentary, textual and graphic sources in the Municipal Archives, and has another theory.

“Once the entire photographic collection had been examined, I found the first documentary evidence of [the trees’] origin in the minutes of the session of the local governing body on December 13, 1912, in which the Councillor Desiderio Carmona proposed ‘the acquisition of forty-two acacias and four ficus trees at the price of three pesetas for the former and seven for the latter, from the Casa Robillard in Valencia’. In 1913, four ficus trees were planted (two of which failed to take hold),” he explains

These were the two ficus trees on the north side of the Plaza de España, of the macrophylla species, originally from the east coast of Australia. Later, around the 1940s, the ficus trees on the south side, of the genus Ficus elástica, were planted.