The City Council of La Orotava has communicated its intention to recover the aqueduct of the Colombo neighborhood, a historical element of the municipality unknown to many of its inhabitants and that dates back to 1934, during the Second Republic, due to the need to municipalize the supply service of water.
Thus, the aqueduct was part of one of the phases of the construction project of a network that had to produce the necessary flow to generate the electricity supply with guarantees in the different neighborhoods that the engineer Rafael de Villa y Calzadilla drew up, as recalled today by the La Orotava City Council in a statement.
In this regard, it points out that although Santa Cruz de La Palma had been the first city in the Canary Islands to have an electricity supply, La Orotava was the first municipality on the island of Tenerife to have such an advance, with its first headquarters in the neighborhood. de Barroso, in a place still known as “La Planta Vieja”.
From a diversion tank located on the Camino de Las Maravillas, a two-kilometer-long loading pipe emerged, which would cross the land to the new building of the hydroelectric plant (at that time located in the Aguamansa area), with an elevation difference of up to 486 meters.
With these improvements, the generation of a power that would largely solve the deficiencies of the electrical service was guaranteed.
Villa y Calzadilla’s proposal was revised in 1934 and updated by the military engineer Francisco Armenta, to proceed to place an asphalt steel loading pipe subdivided into eight-meter sections and covered by ordinary masonry walls for external protection, except of the aforementioned section that runs in the Colombo neighborhood, where the marked unevenness of the terrain caused the pipe to run in an aerial way, being supported by a succession of masonry pillars still preserved.
It is, therefore, together with the central located in La Abejera and the “Pesador” or distributor deposit – outstanding engineering work in terms of its morphology and functionality – of an element endowed with a significant patrimonial interest not only from a point of view from a historical point of view but also from an ethnographic perspective and even as a member of a relevant engineering work.
“Its rehabilitation involves not only the recovery and dissemination of an element of great historical importance for the town, still unknown to a large part of the population, but also the revaluation of a unique infrastructure in attention to its morphological characteristics”, underlines the mayor of La Orotava, Francisco Linares.
The consistory already has the necessary reports, signed by the municipal technical of Historical Heritage, to request the necessary financial support from the areas linked to Historical and Cultural Heritage both from the Cabildo de Tenerife and the Government of the Canary Islands, in order to be able to face the necessary conditioning and conservation project.