The value of old water channels returning to life – The National

The value of old water channels returning to life – The National

A friend of mine makes good use of Twitter to display his wide range of interests in the fields of heritage, the arts and more besides. And so, through something my friend had shared, I came across a fascinating article in the Spanish newspaper El Pais about a programme to bring back to life some of the 1,000-year-old water channels called acequias that once irrigated much of the landscape around the city of Granada in the south of Spain.

The Aynadamar acequia was originally built in the 11th Century to supply Granada’s historic Albaicin quarter. It later supplied the artisans of the Nasrid dynasty who built the Alhambra Palace, one of the glories of Arab-Islamic Spain, in the 12th and 13th Centuries. It remained operational until the 1980s, when it fell into disuse because road construction interrupted its flow.

Thousands of kilometres of acequias were built, supplying water not only to cities like Granada but towns, villages and hillsides across southern Spain, Al Andalus (Andalucia).