Mission Espada aqueduct
— water still moving the way the friars set it in 1745.
Not only on a wall.
Mission Espada 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 Espada Aqueduct carries water across Piedras Creek on two limestone arches, part of the acequia system the Franciscans built in the 1740s to irrigate the mission fields. It still works. Water from the San Antonio River runs through the ditch and out into farmland that has been worked, by one community or another, for almost three hundred years. The site sits within Mission Espada park.
The place, in three passes.
The Espada Aqueduct lies on Espada Road in southern San Antonio, about a mile north of Mission San Francisco de la Espada. Completed in 1745, the limestone structure spans Piedras Creek on two arches and remains in use as part of the original acequia irrigation system that fed the mission's fields. The aqueduct, the mission, and the dam upstream are administered by the National Park Service as part of the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, and were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015.
The acequia draws from the San Antonio River at the Espada Dam, a curved limestone weir completed in 1745, and runs roughly five miles south through a hand-cut earthen channel. The aqueduct lifts the ditch over Piedras Creek on two arches, so the flow continues uninterrupted. Local farmers still hold acequia water rights and irrigate fields below the mission. The structure is widely cited as the oldest Spanish colonial aqueduct still in use in the United States.
The aqueduct sits within a small National Park Service unit on Espada Road, open daily from sunrise to sunset, with no admission fee. A short footpath leads from the parking pull-off to the structure and onto the grassy banks of Piedras Creek. Mission Espada itself lies about a mile south along the Mission Reach trail, which connects all four southern San Antonio missions by paved bike path. Sunday Mass at Espada is offered in English and Spanish.
