The Padre Tembleque aqueduct, or Arcos de Zempoala
A sixteenth-century water conveyance built across the dry plains north-east of Mexico City by one Franciscan and the indigenous communities who supplied the labour, its central arcade still standing when a Mexican government survey reached it in 1864. This entry takes the earliest printed measurements the container could open, prints the two that disagree, and keeps the labour and the later spoliation of the structure beside the achievement.
Why this wins its question: The aqueduct is usually met as a heritage listing with a single round height and a founder's name, or as a sentence about a friar's piety. This entry goes to the earliest printed description the container could open, a Mexican government survey of 1864 published in 1865, and takes from it four things the listings drop: the two official measurements of the great arch that disagree with each other by fourteen feet, the seventeen years of indigenous labour that the admiring source names while explaining nothing about how it was raised, the survey's own admission that it had no authentic documents for the place, and the state of the structure in 1864 - abandoned, shaken by earthquakes, quarried by its neighbours, and still standing.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The witness used here is a government survey, not a chronicle. The "Memoria de los trabajos ejecutados por la Comision Cientifica de Pachuca en el ano de 1864", directed by the engineer Ramon Almaraz and ordered into print by the Ministerio de Fomento, was published at Mexico by the press of J. M. Andrade and F. Escalante in 1865, and states on its title page that it continues the commission's earlier memoir of the Valley of Mexico. It was published by order of the imperial government then sitting in Mexico, which is part of what the reader should know about it.
The survey admits at once that it has no documents for the place. Writing of the municipality of Zempoala on printed page 167, it records that the town is very old and that ruins lie near it whose age nobody has yet determined, and then says plainly that it can say nothing about the foundation or history of the place "por falta de documentos autenticos". What follows about the aqueduct is therefore quotation from earlier books, and it is treated as that here.
On printed page 168 the memoir turns to the structure itself: in the municipality there is to be admired an ancient and colossal work called the "Arqueria o Arcos de Zempoala", and the commission reprints what is said of it in the "Diccionario Universal de Historia, Geografia y Estadistica". That reprinted article, and not the commission's own observation, is the source of everything in the next three claims.
The reprinted account: Fray Francisco Tembleque, one of the first Franciscan missionaries in Mexico, living at Otumba, noticed the want of water there and undertook to bring it from springs fifteen leagues away. Having no money for materials he fell back on the scant liberality of private persons and on the co-operation of the indigenous population; with them he had his workmen and his tools; he was himself "arquitecto, sobrestante, maestro y peon en la labor"; and the work went on for seventeen years, ending in an aqueduct of lime and stone three varas thick, carried at whatever height the ground required.
The labour is named in the same sentence as the achievement, and it should be read with the account's own bias in view. The article credits the indigenous co-operation in warm adjectives - it calls it frank, untiring and freely given - and it offers no evidence at all about how seventeen years of that labour were recruited, paid or organised, in a colonial society whose ordinary instruments for public works were the drafted labour of Indian towns. The friar's part in the story is exactly what a mid-nineteenth-century admirer of the first missionaries would emphasise. The one thing the passage settles is that the aqueduct was not built with money.
For dimensions the article quotes Lucas Alaman's Disertaciones: the conduit passes over three bridges, the first of forty-six arches, the second of thirteen, and the third, the most notable and visible on the Otumba road near the famous battlefield of that name, of sixty-seven arches over an extent of one thousand and fifty-nine varas and a third, with the middle arch one hundred and twenty-eight feet high, which is forty-two varas and two thirds, and seventy feet or twenty-three varas wide, so that a warship could pass under it with all sail set.
The memoir then prints a figure that contradicts the one it has just quoted, and declines to choose between them: the statistical notice of the Department of Mexico published in the Anales del Ministerio de Fomento assigns the largest arch a height of forty-seven and a half varas, a little over one hundred and forty-two feet, in place of the one hundred and twenty-eight given by Alaman. Two official Mexican measurements of the same arch, fourteen feet apart, are on the record together, and neither is a modern survey.
The condition of the work in 1864 is the commission's own contribution, and it is a mixed report: the magnificent work is now abandoned, and in spite of the time elapsed, the severe earthquakes it has suffered and the spoliation of it by the people of the surrounding country, the arches remain standing, causing the admiration of travellers, and waiting for local industry to find some use for them.
An eighteenth-century witness reaches this entry only at second hand. The memoir quotes Villasenor's Teatro americano on the Otumba arches: they were built by a religious of the order of Saint Francis to carry water to the town, a very deep ravine between two hills made the arcade necessary, the piers are so high that a stone hurled by hand can barely reach their top, and they are so clear of weeds that the noble mixture of their fabric excites admiration. Villasenor reads the cost of the work as proof of the former opulence of the jurisdiction. This corpus has the Teatro americano registered from its own sheets for other purposes, but did not open the leaf carrying this passage, so it is carried here as a quotation inside the 1865 memoir.
What this entry deliberately does not assert. The passage read gives no date for the beginning or the completion of the work, no name for the springs, and no figure for the total length of the conduit beyond the fifteen leagues of distance and the extent of the third arcade; so no construction dates are stated here, although they are commonly given in the general literature. No sixteenth-century document, and no modern archaeological or engineering survey, was reachable from this container, and the tier of this entry is set by that limit rather than by the antiquity of its subject.