Dipòsit de les Aigües: A Roman Cistern Full of Books
Why is it significant?
From the outside it looks like a fortress wall: a plain, massive block of brick, a little forbidding, on a street of university buildings.
Key Facts
| Place | Dipòsit de les Aigües: A Roman Cistern Full of Books |
|---|---|
| Address | Carrer de Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, 08005 Barcelona, Spain |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.39040, 2.18890 |
| Part of Walk | From the 1888 Expo to the Catalan Manchester: Ciutadella Park & Poblenou, Barcelona |
| Generated | Generated |
From the outside it looks like a fortress wall: a plain, massive block of brick, a little forbidding, on a street of university buildings. If the doors are open, step inside... and you are standing in a forest of tall brick pillars, joined by arches, rising to a vaulted ceiling, with students bent over laptops between them.
This is the Dipòsit de les Aigües, the water reservoir. Josep Fontserè, the designer of the park, built it in the 1870s to hold the water for the Cascada and for watering the gardens. The tank itself was on the roof, and everything you see inside was there to carry its enormous weight. That is why the pillars are so thick and the arches so many: this is a building designed to hold up a lake.
And here our young friend appears again. Antoni Gaudí, still a student, is believed to have helped Fontserè with the structural calculations for the reservoir. Whether that was a small job or a real share of the design, historians still debate. But it is pleasant to imagine the future builder of the Sagrada Família learning on this project how a vault carries a load down into the ground.
For most of the twentieth century the reservoir was no longer needed for water, and it passed through a series of humbler uses. Then, in the 1990s, it was restored and turned into a library for Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the public university named after the linguist who standardised modern Catalan. The architects kept the bare brick and the rhythm of the arches, and simply filled the space with shelves and light.
People often call it Barcelona's Roman cistern, and it really does feel like one, though it is barely a hundred and fifty years old. From here you leave the nineteenth century behind. Head east, past the university buildings and into the Olympic Village, to the broad Avinguda d'Icària, and look up at the strange structures twisting over its central walkway.