Ahuehuete del Centenario

On 20 September 1596, Spanish colonist Don Diego de Montemayor founded the city of Nuestra Señora (Our Lady) of Monterrey, in honor of Gaspar de Zúñiga y Acevedo, Viceroy of Mexico at the time and who was also the Count of Monterrey. The settlement was intended to become the capital of the "New Kingdom of León" after the Spanish region. To date, the city has come to be known simply as Monterrey and it remains the capital of what is now the Mexican state of Nuevo León, it also anchors what in the early 2020s became the country's second most-populated metropolitan area (with Metro Mexico City at a very distant first place).

The 400th anniversary of this foundation in 1996 was celebrated with plenty of events, many of which were headed by the then Governor of Nuevo León Benjamín Clariond and Monterrey Mayor Jesús Hinojosa Tijerina, and which left a legacy well beyond that period. An example is a time capsule intended to be opened in 2046 (the 450th anniversary), as well as the living legacy represented by the Centennial Ahuehuete.

The dedication plaque near this specimen of Taxodium mucronatum (which has many other common names including Montezuma cypress in English and sabino in Spanish) states that it was gifted to the city in January of 1996 by Carlos Alanís Von Der Meden and family. Alanís was at one point the CEO of Grupo Vivero Imperial, considered as Mexico's largest grower of urban trees, as of 2022 he was president of the Mexican Arboriculture Society, which makes sense of his gifting of a specimen of "Mexico's national tree" on such an important occasion.