Mãe d'Água das Amoreiras: Where the Aqueduct Ends
Why is it significant?
Stand in the small square of mulberry trees and face the heavy stone building that looks like a fortress with no windows to shoot from. To your left, the last arches of an aqueduct march in over the rooftops and simply stop, as if they had run out of breath.
Key Facts
| Place | Mãe d'Água das Amoreiras: Where the Aqueduct Ends |
|---|---|
| Address | Praça das Amoreiras 10, 1250-020 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.72130, -9.15570 |
| Part of Walk | Lisbon's Garden Hills: Aqueduct Water, Giant Trees & the Estrela Basilica |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the small square of mulberry trees and face the heavy stone building that looks like a fortress with no windows to shoot from. To your left, the last arches of an aqueduct march in over the rooftops and simply stop, as if they had run out of breath. That is exactly where they were meant to stop.
For centuries Lisbon was a city surrounded by water and dying of thirst. The river is salty here, the old fountains were few, and every drop had to be carried uphill. So in 1731 King João V ordered an aqueduct, the Águas Livres, the Free Waters, and the people of Lisbon paid for it through a tax on everyday goods like meat, wine and olive oil. Water began reaching the city in 1748, after travelling through stone channels from springs in the hills to the northwest.
This building is the Mãe d'Água, the Mother of Water, the reservoir where that journey ended. The Hungarian-born architect Carlos Mardel designed it in 1746, but it was only completed in 1834, almost ninety years later. Inside, a tank roughly seven metres deep holds about five and a half thousand cubic metres of water, and a little cascade still falls into it from the channel... a sound like rain inside a cathedral. When the great earthquake of 1755 flattened the lower city, the aqueduct survived almost untouched.
The aqueduct has a darker legend too. In the 1830s a man called Diogo Alves was said to rob walkers on its high footpath over the Alcântara valley and throw them to their deaths. He was hanged in 1841, and the story goes that his head was kept in a jar for medical study... where it still sits today.
And the mulberries around you? They are a living fossil of industry. In the eighteenth century the Royal Silk Factory worked just down the hill, and mulberry leaves fed its silkworms, which is why this place is called Amoreiras, the mulberry trees. Follow the line of the trees downhill to Largo do Rato, two minutes away, where the aqueduct water finally reached the people.