The Aqueduct of Padre Tembleque Is Mexico's Newest UNESCO World Heritage Site Christine Delsol - SFGate
go to original July 15, 2015

Mexico's Aqueduct of Padre Tembleque hydraulic system. The main arcade at dawn. (Edgar Valtiago)

The 27 sites UNESCO named to its World Heritage list last week include some very famous places: France's Champagne and Burgundy regions, Spain's Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route, the ruins of Turkey's grand Roman monuments of Ephesus, the Alamo in the United States.

Others are less familiar but deeply significant, including the site in Jordan where Jesus was believed to have been baptized by John the Baptist, and Iran's Marymand desert area, populated by a semi-nomadic people who tend animals in mountain pastures but retreat to desert caves in the winter.

And then there are sites most of the world has never heard of, places like a hunting ground in Denmark's North Zealand, a group of archaeological sites from one of South Korea's earliest kingdoms or the Fray Bentos cultural-industrial landscape in Uruguay. Mexico's single entry for 2015, the 16th-century Aqueduct of Padre Tembleque hydraulic system, fits squarely on that list.

The Aqueduct of Padre Tembleque hydraulic system is more intriguing than its name makes it sound. Stretching nearly 30 miles between Otumba in the state of Mexico and the Tecajete volcano near Zempoala, Hidalgo, this is considered the Americas' most important hydraulic engineering feat of the 16th century. The canal system, also called Los Arcos de Zempoala, was designed in the mid-1500s by Franciscan Friar Francisco de Tembleque of the Otumba convent to bring potable water to indigenous people in a region where Spanish settlers were hoarding the scarce water sources.

...UNESCO calls the aqueduct system "an example of the exchange of influences between the European tradition of Roman hydraulics and traditional Mesoamerican construction techniques, including the use of adobe." But they neglected to mention it is flat-out beautiful. Built of distinctive local and volcanic stone, its water tanks call to mind some of the early missions and haciendas, its cisterns resemble churches and its arches are adorned with pictographs and miniature shrines to the Virgin.

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