Historic eighteenth-century stone aqueduct that continues to carry water across a creek through one of the oldest surviving Spanish colonial irrigation systems in the United States.
General Information
How to Get There
From San Antonio (10 mi): Take I-37 south to Loop 410, head south on Roosevelt Avenue, continue onto Espada Road, and follow the signs to the aqueduct parking area.
Overview
Espada Aqueduct, built by Franciscan friars in 1731, is the oldest Spanish aqueduct still in use in the United States — a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and National Historic Landmark tucked into a quiet stretch of the San Antonio River near Mission San Francisco de la Espada. It's part of a 15-mile network of gravity-flow ditches, dams, and channels the missionaries built to irrigate roughly 3,500 acres of farmland along the river, adapting the acequia system Spain had inherited from the Romans and Moors centuries earlier.
What makes the site worth the short detour is that the system still works: the main ditch, or acequia madre, still carries water to the old mission farmlands, and nearby residents still use it today, nearly three centuries after it was dug.
Things to Do
Walk the Aqueduct and Acequia Madre
Follow the stone aqueduct where it carries the ditch over Piedras Creek, then trace the main channel to see the irrigation system that has watered these fields since the 1730s.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Espada Acequia", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
