The Aqueduct

Over the I don't know how many centuries of millennia that man has been building things, we have, as a species, managed to pull off some amazing feats. Whether it's a simple hut for shelter or 2,000 foot plus tall skyscrapers or packed dirt roads or cable-stayed bridges, at some point (and I'm sure someone will prove me wrong very soon here), we've covered pretty much any kind of structure you could possibly conceive of on, above or below the surface of this planet that we live on.

One of the most important things man has ever built which operates on the most simple principle but that was a huge effort to build was the aqueduct. Now, I know we have underground aqueducts even today. I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the ones that I always think of when someone says aqueduct. You know, the long, linear stone things consisting of arch after arch after arch stretching across miles and miles of countryside. Think Romans, even though they were not the first to come up with such a notion.

Think about it. These things were built with the express purpose of bringing water to somewhere that had a lot of water to somewhere that humans lived that didn't have enough water. That's all they did. But water is essential for life. It's pretty much as important as things on the importance scale get in this world. 

The engineering of getting the water from points A to B was pretty simple. You just sloped the top of the aqueduct down. It's just gravity. But over a long distance, that's not so simple. You typically have to start with a pretty tall structure so that the top can slope down over miles and miles, even when the terrain slopes up. These things were engineering marvels. Essential, simple and complicated.

I don't think I've spent a lot of time in my life checking out aqueducts. That's not for a lack of desire. The Pont du Gard in southern France has to be on my non-bucket-list bucket list. I'm sure there are others out there as well. But in all the places I've traveled, I just don't think there's been anywhere that I've been that has had a notable aqueduct of any kind of size or scale. I remember a single arch of a ruin in Barcelona but other than that, I can't remember any.

And then we went to Portugal, where we saw three. Now admittedly, one (in Lisbon) was from the window seat of our inbound flight and another (in Coimbra) was from from the back seat of a taxi while we were searching for a COVID test to allow us to come back home. But we also spent a couple of days in the city of Évora in Portugal's Alentejo Region and managed to get up close and personal with one of these things. The opportunity could not be passed up.

Évora's aqueduct, just inside the northern wall of the city.

Évora is an old place. Recorded history of human settlement there goes all the way back to the Celts and the second century B.C., although there are prehistoric cave paintings and at least one odd stone circle that suggest that man has been around the site where Évora sits for much longer than any written record suggests. Over the last two millennia, the city has been occupied, built and modified by the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors and now the Portuguese. In the Middle Ages (starting in the 15th century), Évora became the preferred place of residence for the royal family, elevating what now looks like a tiny town to second city importance in the nation.

It is actually staggering today to think that Évora would ever be a place of importance to something like a whole nation. In the 21st century, it is just an historic town in the middle of nowhere. There's no obvious mode of travel there other than whatever you drive on a road or other paved surface and it is surrounded by acres upon acres of farmland. It's gorgeous but it's also barren and not obviously important. But it was. Something about trade routes if I'm remembering right.

When the Romans occupied Évora, they built an aqueduct stretching about 11 miles north of the city to bring water all the way to the city's main square. I have no idea how the residents of the town had access to water before that time. Maybe it wasn't big enough to need a bona fide source and they survived on wells, although all of that is complete speculation. Anyway, for whatever reason, the Romans felt the city needed one, so they built one. The Romans had a tendency to do that.

The Praça do Giraldo, Évora. 

The aqueduct the Romans built is not the one standing in Évora today. In the early 1500s, the entire length of the aqueduct was re-built according to the designs of Francisco de Arruda, who happened to be the royal architect (I'm sure that was quite the gig) at the time. Francisco de Arruda made a pretty big impact on Portuguese built history. We visited his Tower de Belém earlier in the week before we made our way to Évora. I'm sure there are more than two of his works still standing but if it somehow were just two after almost 500 years, that ain't too shabby.

The new aqueduct took about six years to complete from 1531 or so to 1537 and was named the Água de Prata Aqueduct, or (translated into English) the Aqueduct of Silver Water. It started in the same spot as the Roman aqueduct and ended at the fountain in the Praça de Giraldo, also matching the Roman version's end point. Inside the city walls, it served a series of fountains that allowed citizens of Évora to gather fresh water.

The aqueduct today doesn't provide the city of Évora with fresh water. I guess they figured out a better way to do that over last almost 500 years. I'm not surprised at all by that fact. But I was surprised to learn that the aqueduct did provide Évora with water until 1979 and that the structure still supplies water to farms outside the city wall today. I'm shocked any place is using a water system with this kind of aqueduct for anything in 2021. It's actually kind of cool.

Today, there is a path alongside the aqueduct that stretches a little more than five miles outside the north wall of the city. Considering the limited time we had in Évora and the fact that if we walked out any sort of distance, we'd have to walk the same distance back, we decided not to do that. Instead, we took a walk outside the north wall of the city and then traced what is left of the aqueduct from the north wall all the way to the city's main square. It's not a continuous path so following the aqueduct is a bit of a treasure hunt. Quite simply, it's just gone in certain spots.

The aqueduct along the Rua do Cano. Why build your own outside wall when there's an arch already there?

The longest continuous stretch of the Água de Prata aqueduct by far is just inside the north city wall along the east side of the Rua do Cano. You can't miss it as you walk east from the Porta da Lagoa. It's an enormous arched structure that dominates the street view. It is so impressive to stand near to those tall arches that have been standing for about 500 years. Think about how impressive the construction must have been back then. Or even more impressive...in Roman times some 1,500 years before that. 

We took a guided tour of Évora after our walking self-guided tracing of the aqueduct. Our guide on that tour told us the Roman version of the aqueduct was three times as high as the one there now. While I'm not doubting the expertise of our guide, that seems pretty implausible and pretty well unnecessary. I mean there's no need to improve the performance of a working aqueduct and the one at its current height seems to have done the job well enough for four plus centuries.

Rua do Cano, like so many other streets in Portugal everywhere, slopes up. Évora, like most towns and cities built a long time ago, was built on a hill for defensive purposes (I'm guessing there a little bit). Thus, the very tall aqueduct. Can't feed the tallest spot in the city by gravity without starting at a significant elevation. 

As tall as the aqueduct is at the north end of Rua do Cano, by the time you get not very far along the street, you'll find that you can stand on your toes and reach the top of the aqueduct pretty easily. Towards the north end of the Rua, the locals have taken full advantage of the fact that there is an intermittent sturdy stone wall in place by building the exterior walls of their houses and shops in between the supports of each arch. Hey, if there's something there already, may as well save some time and money by making the aqueduct a part of your own outside wall.

Best shot I could get of the top of the aqueduct. At the top of Rua do Cano.

As you walk south down the Rua do Cano, You might lose the aqueduct as it disappears into the hill and the buildings built around it. Keep going and keep checking the streets on your right to pick it up again. If you hit the Rua de Avis, you've gone too far. If you care about completeness in sequence, go back. Otherwise walk right down the Rua de Avis and you'll find it pretty easily.

At the bottom of the Rua de Avis, there is a well-preserved, freestanding part of the aqueduct that makes a hard right and then a hard left. It's the best corner of the aqueduct in the city and it's kind of cool to see how de Arruda handled the corner. You are closer to the end of the aqueduct at this point than you are to the city wall. You'll lost sight of the arches as you head south into the Praça de Sertório but take the alley on the left of the Praça and you'll find it again easily enough.

Down the alley, it is worth a stop at the top of the Rua Nova to take note of a couple of things around you. At the west side of the intersection, there is a stone structure with a series of slim, Tuscan columns. The structure was a water-storing reservoir (might be a bit redundant there) with the remains of a fountain on its front. This was one of the publicly accessible spots for citizens of Évora to gather water.

It is also the most renaissance-y part of the aqueduct. You can mistake the rest of it easily for a Roman structure. Except at this point. This is all 16th century.

Bottom of the Rua de Avis and top of the Rua Nova.

Speaking of the Romans, at this very same point in the city, there is a portion of the old Roman city wall. It's on the south side of Rua Nova at this intersection and it's standing next to a piece of wall built during the 16th century. I've added a picture of that wall below.

If there were ever any doubt about the Romans' superiority in building walls, buildings and pretty much anything else they touched, just look at the picture below. The right hand side of the photograph is the Roman wall, about 2,000 years old. The left side of the picture is a much newer wall. Say about 500 years old. The Roman wall is built of ashlar masonry carefully quarried and shaped with relatively uniform mortar joints both horizontally and vertically between the stone blocks. The other side...maybe not so much. There's very little sense of regularity whatsoever and pieces of stone are jammed in wherever they are needed to make the wall look like a whole wall.

There are times in my travels that I come across Roman walls or buildings or roads that I wonder how we could have lost the science and technology and skill that the Romans brought to building. I guess we did go through a period of time in Europe known as the Dark Ages, but still...it's amazing how we forgot. The Romans were good at building. I mean, not quite the Incas, but pretty darned good all the same. 

Walking down Rua Nova. Take a left at the bottom and you are in the Praça do Giraldo.

From the Roman wall, it's a quick walk down Rua Nova; past the dispensary on the right with its doorway inside another of the aqueduct's arches; and left at the bottom of the hill and you get to the center of the town, the Praça do Giraldo. 

In times way before the 21st century and with both versions of the aqueduct, the show would stop here. The main plaza of the city was the end point of the silver water. If you were lucky enough to have a reservoir or fountain near your home on the 1500s version of the aqueduct, you could get water close to your home. Otherwise the main city square was it.

Just like the path of that water all those years ago, our journey following the Água de Prata aqueduct stopped at the Plaça do Giraldo also. I loved taking less than an hour in our day in Évora and doing this walk. It was not only fascinating and fun to follow the aqueduct itself, but it also took us past a whole host of interesting views and spots. It's not just walking alongside a work of engineering, it's exploring the history of the city itself. 

I've tried in this post to concentrate on the path and structure of the aqueduct itself and not get to get distracted by other things along the way. But there is one more spot that I think is worth mentioning as a stop along the length of the journey. Between the bottom of the Rua de Avis and the top of the Rua Nova, there is a small fenced in opening with some sort of temple ruin behind it. I'm assuming it's Roman but I have not been able to find the name of the place online. I guess I should have asked the guide who took us on a tour of the city but I just plain forgot.

This is not the first time we've been to a city and latched onto a tour of ruins as a marker of the past on one of our travels. We did something similar in Barcelona with the city wall in 2014 and there's a link to that story earlier in this post just after the second picture. This one was different. It got us to parts of Évora that we likely wouldn't have visited any other way. Without the aqueduct, we probably would have just visited the Roman temple, the Cathedral and the public gardens. We did those anyway (and so should you if you are in Évora). The aqueduct was a great complement to those more popular tourist sights. 

Now...onto the Pont du Gard. Sometime.

Ruin of a Roman temple? Need some help on this one.

---

How We Did It

As soon as I knew that Évora had a centuries old aqueduct ruin running through the town I was determined to trace its entire path from the city wall to the main square.

The difficulty I found was that there was no real good online resource showing how to do it. I found a couple of blog posts and some travel sites describing the Água de Prata but no maps or turn-by-turn directions. I was actually concerned that we would not be able to do it, although having now been to Évora I'm convinced I could have walked every street in the place in the time we spent there. But let's face it, that would have taken a long time.

Fortunately, our hotel in Évora (the Vitoria Stone Hotel, if you must know) had an excellent map of the city showing the exact route of the aqueduct. I found the map to be perfect for what we were looking to do so I'm posting it below. We maybe had to backtrack once or twice (there are not enough street names to do it right the first time) but we did the whole thing from outside the city wall to the Praça do Giraldo in about 45 minutes. Get some chestnuts or some cork souvenirs or a pastry somewhere after that. You deserve all three.

Enough said about all that. Follow the map. The aqueduct is at number 11 and stretches to the north and south.

---