Aqueduct of Segovia

The aqueduct does not stand at the edge of Segovia; it walks straight through it. At Plaza del Azoguejo its double tier of granite arches climbs to about 28.5 m above the street, and people pass beneath arches that have carried water, or at least the channel for it, since the Roman period. The whole elevated bridge runs for roughly 728 m and has 167 arches, and the blocks are laid entirely without mortar, held in place by their own weight and careful cutting. It is the emblem of the city and appears on its coat of arms.

Its date has been argued over for centuries because the dedicatory inscription is gone. The bronze letters that once sat in the attic storey were long ago removed, but the historian Géza Alföldy reconstructed the text from the holes left by their fixings and attributed the work to Domitian, suggesting completion around 98 AD. Excavation evidence published in 2016 points somewhat later, to after 112 AD, under Trajan or early in Hadrian's reign. The water came from the Río Frío in the mountains about 17 km away, first settling in a tank called El Caserón and a second decanting tower, the Casa de Aguas, before running on a gentle gradient towards the rocky spur of the old town.

Walk the line of the aqueduct from Plaza Díaz Sanz to the Azoguejo and the structure grows from a low single row of arches into its full two-storey height. Thirty-six arches were rebuilt in the late 15th century under the Catholic Monarchs after a Moorish raid in 1072 had destroyed a section; the restorers took care to match the Roman work, and the difference is hard to spot. Two niches on the highest part once held figures: one now contains an image of the Virgin, the other stands empty. Remarkably, the aqueduct went on supplying Segovia with water until 1973.

Inside the city, the Real Casa de Moneda, the old royal mint, houses an interpretation centre on the aqueduct, and coins struck in Segovia bore the aqueduct as their mint mark. The Old Town and its aqueduct together became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, and the old town it once supplied, crowned by the Alcázar, rises directly behind the arches.

Getting there

The aqueduct is in the centre of Segovia, at the foot of the old town. The nearest major airport is Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas (MAD), about 68 km away in a straight line. From Madrid the quickest link is the high-speed train from Chamartín to Segovia-Guiomar, a journey of under half an hour; Guiomar station lies outside the town, and a city bus or taxi covers the last stretch, roughly 15–20 minutes, to the aqueduct.