Aperçu
The Aqueduct of Segovia spans the Plaza del Azoguejo in the centre of the old city of Segovia, in the Castile and León region of central Spain. It is the most monumental and best-preserved Roman aqueduct on the Iberian Peninsula, and one of the most complete to survive anywhere in the former Roman world. The structure carried water from the Frío River in the Guadarrama mountains, gathering it about 17 kilometres away and channelling it by a gently sloping conduit to the city.
The visible monument is the elevated section that crosses the valley at the city's edge: a two-tiered arcade of superimposed arches that reaches a maximum height of about 28.5 metres above the lowest point of the plaza. It is built of roughly 25,000 blocks of local unmortared granite, held in place by nothing but their own weight and precise cutting — there is no mortar, clamp, or cement anywhere in the arcade. The longest and tallest stretch comprises 167 arches.
The aqueduct's exact construction date is debated but is generally placed in the late 1st or early 2nd century CE, under the Flavian emperors or Trajan. A monumental inscription once ran along the attic in bronze letters, now lost, leaving only the holes that anchored them; attempts to reconstruct the text have not produced a secure date. Two niches on the structure later held Christian statues, including one of the Virgin.
Remarkably, the aqueduct continued to deliver water to Segovia until the second half of the 19th century, and parts of the system functioned into the 20th. Its survival is owed both to the quality of its engineering and to continuous maintenance through the medieval and modern periods, including repairs under the Catholic Monarchs in the late 15th century that rebuilt arches damaged during Moorish rule.