Bosque El Olivar

This guide to Bosque El Olivar in Lima opens with the lush grass carpeting the ground and the case that it is slowly drowning the centuries-old olive forest around it. It traces the grove back to the 1560s, when a Spanish settler named Antonio de Rivera carried cuttings across the Atlantic and only three survived to take root in Lima's desert soil, multiplying into thousands of trees declared a national monument in 1959. It follows how the city, trying to be generous, later drenched the drought-built trees in millions of gallons of water a week, and what park director Fernando de la Vega says these trees could do if simply left alone.