Important update: the palm is no longer there. The Canary Island date palm that stood at this roundabout for roughly a century was removed in 2022, killed by a fungal infection that could not be treated. After a public vote, an ahuehuete — the Montezuma cypress, Mexico's national tree — was planted in its place, and the roundabout is now known as the Glorieta de los Ahuehuetes. Everything below is the story of what was there before.
Where the avenue comes from. Paseo de la Reforma was conceived in the 1860s by Maximilian of Habsburg as the Paseo de la Emperatriz, a direct road from Chapultepec Castle, where the emperors lived, to the Imperial Palace, now the Palacio Nacional. European-style medians and gardens were laid out along it. Between 1872 and 1876, under Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, four roundabouts with native flowers were added, and the Champs-Élysées character of the avenue was pushed further by Porfirio Díaz, along with the monuments to Cuauhtémoc, Columbus and the Ángel de la Independencia.
And then one roundabout with no monument at all. Just a palm. The earliest photograph showing it dates from 1920, where it already appears small, which led researchers to place its planting in the late nineteenth century, within the same beautification projects. It survived decades of traffic, earthquakes and pollution, and became a meeting point: "see you at the Glorieta de la Palma" needed no further explanation.
A footnote worth keeping. In 1992 the historian Silvio Zavala published Una palmera y una idea en el Paseo de la Reforma, which set out for the first time a proposal to build on that spot a truncated pyramid recalling the linguistic and cultural base of the pre-Columbian peoples. It was never built — and the roundabout ended up with a native tree instead.
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