Paseo de los Plátanos

The Campo del Moro gardens hold a path that appears in no street directory: the Crown’s private walks fell outside the chronicles. The Paseo de los Plátanos begins at the entrance plaza on the Paseo de la Virgen del Puerto, runs behind the Carriage Museum and ends at the Fountain of the Tritons. Its course winds, the very opposite of the straight avenue that Narciso Pascual y Colomer had drawn in 1844. That grid was not carried out until the last decade of the 19th century, when the gardener Ramón Oliva reinterpreted it with a landscaper’s eye, planting nearly nine thousand five hundred trees, four hundred palms and more than twenty thousand shrubs. The plane trees that give the walk its name are hybrids, Platanus × hispanica. The species had entered Spain from France through the Prince’s Gardens at Aranjuez; they reached the Campo del Moro with the plantings of 1890 to 1898. Several are now over a hundred and fifty years old and rank among the notable trees of Madrid.