Segovia Roman aqueduct
— granite stacked dry, holding two thousand years.
Not only on a wall.
Segovia Roman aqueduct, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The aqueduct runs nearly a kilometre into the old city and reaches its full height — about 28 metres — where it crosses the Plaza del Azoguejo on 167 arches. Roman engineers built it from local granite blocks, fitted without mortar, sometime around the late first century. It carried water from the Río Frío, seventeen kilometres away in the Guadarrama foothills. It still stands, on weight and geometry alone.
The place, in three passes.
The aqueduct of Segovia is the largest surviving Roman structure on the Iberian peninsula and the symbol of the city. It enters from the southeast and runs roughly 813 metres above ground, reaching its tallest section, 28.5 metres, where it crosses the Plaza del Azoguejo. The structure carried water from the Acebeda spring on the Río Frío, a source about seventeen kilometres south in the Sierra de Guadarrama, into the old city's distribution tank on the cathedral hill. UNESCO inscribed the aqueduct together with the old town of Segovia in 1985.
The visible aqueduct is built of roughly 20,400 ashlar blocks of local granite, cut and stacked without mortar or iron clamps. The arches — 167 of them in the surviving above-ground section, in two tiers where the ground falls away from the Azoguejo — stand on the friction and weight of dressed stone alone. Dating is debated, but most scholarship places construction in the late first or early second century, under the emperors Domitian, Nerva, or Trajan. The water it carried ran continuously into the twentieth century.
The aqueduct is free to view at any hour and is at its best in late afternoon, when low sun rakes the granite and the arches throw long shadows across the Plaza del Azoguejo. Stairs at the Postigo climb to a viewpoint level with the upper tier, where the scale registers properly against the city behind. The old city begins immediately above, with the cathedral and the Alcázar a fifteen-minute walk west. Floodlighting comes on at sunset and runs until midnight, changing the granite from grey to warm gold.
