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| Acueducto de Saladavieja |
Aqueduct de Saladavieja
East of Estepona town just past Carrefour supermarket
you will find a small aqueduct that bears the name of the forgotten
Roman town. It is located opposite the Palacio de Congreso y
Exposiciones.
Looking incongruous surround by hypermarkets, exhibition halls and
yet another of the ubiquitous urbanisations, is a shoreside patch
of ground still given over to private smallholdings. Walk past and
around the compact white building at its edge and you will see the
stretch of aqueduct standing out of sight of the road among the
unkempt vegetation. Well over a thousand years old it was used to
carry water from a well to irrigate the small fertile valley. Though
the arches are Moorish, the pillars are most certainly built on
Roman and Visigothic foundations.
The large water tank, which fed the irrigation channels,
can still be seen, and if you follow the aqueduct from there you
will come to the well from which the water was, and is, drawn. This
is most impressive - fifteen or twenty feet deep with a fine arch
two-thirds of the way down on the right-hand side. Originally, the
water would have been drawn up and fed into the aqueduct by a donkey
operating a wheel-and-pulley system. Today an electric pump is used.
Unemployment among Andalucían donkeys owes much to Thomas
Edison.
Around the aqueduct there are uncultivated fig,
orange and banana trees, which suggest that the well and aqueduct
have been in more or less continual use since their construction
more than ten centuries ago. It remains to be seen how much longer
either can survive. The relentless spread of the urbanisation is
already threatening this anachronistic patch of ground, and may
well rollover it like a concrete fog before too long.
Just a two-minute drive further along the coast,
the urbanisation of Hacienda Beach hides another well-aqueduct-water
tank complex. Simply drive in and the tank is instantly visible
to your left. It is very large, with a paved floor. The aqueduct
itself is not particularly long, perhaps thirty or forty yards,
and unfortunately, the area corresponding to the well from which
it drew its water is fenced off.
The above text was reproduced from the the book
"In Search of Andalucia" by kind permission of the authors
David Wood and Chris Wawn. Click
here to order your copy from our online book store.
GPS Location: 36º
25' 49'' N 5º 07' 38'' W
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