Piped water for Guadalajara (1563-1742): a levelling survey, an infiltration gallery and a decision not to tax the poor
Guadalajara had wells in every house and spent two centuries trying to get piped water anyway. A maestro mayor levelled a spring about 1600 and reported it would arrive below the plaza; a 1641 commission lapsed; then a Franciscan lay brother founded a concrete conduit in pumice, vaulted a gallery two men could walk through and sank over a thousand wells to feed it. The judge in charge refused the levy the king had ordered because it would fall on the poor.
Why this wins its question: Colonial Spanish American hydraulics reaches English-language readers as a handful of monumental aqueducts, photographed rather than explained, and almost never as a decision process. This object gives one city's complete water file across a hundred and eighty years from a single eyewitness chapter: the four reasons the city wanted piped water including the one modern accounts would omit, a 1563 cedula demanding need, source and cost before granting anything, a named maestro mayor's levelling about 1600 that killed the cheap option with a measured shortfall of one vara and five fingers, two financing schemes that lapsed, and then the construction method in the engineer's own terms — lime concrete founded in pumice, a vaulted gallery two men could walk through, inspection shafts, a thousand infiltration wells aligned to the prevailing wind — together with a performance contract that put the exploration risk on the contractor at a stated unit price. It also carries the decision an admiring summary would lose: a royal judge holding a cedula that ordered him to levy 16,000 pesos on the vecinos, and declining to collect it because the burden would fall on the poor, borrowing from the merchants instead.
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 reasons given for wanting piped water are worth stating exactly, because the obvious one is explicitly denied. The chronicle says the need was "no por falta de ellas, pues en todas las casas hay pozos con que se abastecen", and gives four other grounds: to make water easier to collect; because the site, founded on "el jale ó piedra pómez", is prone to drought and piped water would improve the temperament, "como ya se experimentó"; to avoid the inconvenience of "los concursos de hombres y mujeres en el rio" and at the city canals; and because the need had been recognised from within a few years of the foundation. The third reason is a policing of mixed public gathering at the water, not a sanitary or a supply argument, and this entry records it as one of the four rather than quietly dropping it.
The file opens with a royal order for a feasibility study. The chronicle reports that a few years after the city was founded the king was informed that it was necessary to introduce piped water, and that in view of this he commanded, by cedula of 15 March 1563, that he be informed at greater length "así de la necesidad de dicha agua, como de la parte y lugar de donde se podria conducir, y costos que podria tener". Need, source and cost, requested before any grant; the same year as the bridge repartimiento order in the following chapter. The cedula itself was not seen for this entry.
About 1600 the question was settled by survey, and the survey said no. Under president Santiago de Vera an attempt was made to bring water from a point called los Colomos next to the pueblo of Tzapopan; behind the convent of Santo Domingo, the chronicle says, there were still in 1742 the remains of a basin marking how far that water reached. By the president's order "pesó su altura el maestro mayor Martin Casillas, quien fué de parecer que estaria en la plaza dicha agua una vara y cinco dedos mas baja del suelo, y que era necesario descender por gradas para cogerse". A named master builder levelled a proposed gravity line, reported a shortfall of roughly a vara at the delivery point, and specified the consequence for the user. This is a negative engineering result, recorded with the name of the man who produced it and the number he produced.
Two further attempts failed for reasons of finance rather than of level, and the chronicle names both. A sisa on wine was imposed and governed by the ordinances used at Mexico for the same purpose, "y aunque por tres ó cuatro meses se practicó, no tuvo efecto"; then in 1640 the masters who had weighed the waters of the surroundings judged that the river of Guadalajara could be piped from its source "sin mas costo que el de 16,000 pesos", the city offering to raise that sum by repartimiento among the vecinos, and a cedula of 25 March 1641 commissioned the president and audiencia to carry it out "en justicia". It was never executed, the chronicle says, "ó por la dificultad de su regulacion, ó por haberse considerado difícil ó poco útil la conduccion de dicha agua del rio". The author does not pretend to know which, and states the alternatives instead of choosing.
The work that succeeded was commissioned to a judge and executed by a friar with a construction record. The oidor Juan Rodriguez de Albuerne, marques de Altamira, promoted the matter with the rest of the audiencia; three revenue streams were assigned to it — the estanco de vinos, the licence money on the cattle, mules and horses driven yearly from Nueva Galicia into New Spain, and the 1,500 pesos promised annually by the contractors for the city's meat supply — by cedula of 27 October 1735, for twelve years, extended by another twelve on 15 January 1736. The marques anticipated the assigned funds on his own credit and began work in 1732 under the first cedula. He engaged "un excelente maestro, religioso lego de nuestro Padre San Francisco, llamado Fr. Pedro de Buceta", then in the kingdom collecting alms for the convent of San Antonio of Sanlucar de Barrameda, who had conducted water to the city and port of Veracruz "en donde acreditó el nombre de insigne ingeniero". A named lay brother, hired on a previous municipal water supply as his reference.
The engineering is described in enough detail to be assessed, and it is not an aqueduct. In dry sandy ground sixteen hundred varas west of the plaza, in the most arid part, Buceta founded the receiving basin at surface level; onlookers "tuviéronlo á locura", because water there lay fifteen varas deep. He moved about a thousand varas further west, sank a well, found water at the same fifteen varas, "pesó su altura" and, finding the proportion that would let it run by its own foot to the surface basin, conducted it in open cut; because the soil was "jale, piedra pómez, y arena deleznable" he founded the conduit "de hormigon de piedra y cal, y embovedó una atargea, capaz de que dos hombres anduviesen por ella con tal desembarazo, dejando á distancia lumbreras para su registro", then closed the trench, leaving the surface as before and the conduit well levelled. He afterwards opened "mas de mil pozos, inclinándose para el viento, que média entre Sur y Poniente de la ciudad", congregating the subterranean waters into the receiving well. A levelled gravity line in lime concrete, a vaulted gallery walkable for maintenance, inspection shafts at intervals, and an infiltration field of a thousand wells feeding it.
When the work stalled the engineer answered with a performance contract, and the terms are printed. Progress was suspended for a time, "seria ó por falta de efectos, ó por experimentar el efecto en la duracion"; after more than two years objectors said the water was too little to supply the city, and the spirits of the promoters flagged. Buceta, owed 6,000 pesos for his work, offered at his own cost to mine the ground until he found more water, undertaking to conduct as much again as he discovered, on condition of being paid 12,000 pesos including the six already owed, "y exponia al riesgo"; and with the further condition that if he found still more water, "por cada tanto mas se le habian de dar quinientos pesos". Payment tied to delivered output, with the contractor carrying the exploration risk and a stated unit price for excess. The marques accepted.
The most consequential decision in the chapter is a refusal to collect a tax the king had ordered. The marques held the cedula of 27 October 1735 ordering him to put into practice the repartimiento of the 16,000 pesos the city had promised in 1641; but "conociendo ser toda coleccion odiosa, temió su piadoso celo el clamor de los pobres, á quienes precisamente les habia de ser molesto", and judged that the revenues the king had already assigned were sufficient and only needed to arrive sooner. He consulted the audiencia, convened a junta of the diputados del comercio, and asked the merchants to advance 9,000 pesos on two conditions: that the audiencia inform the king it would be burdensome to charge the public the 16,000 pesos — with the reason that when the city promised them the mescal wine asiento did not yet exist and the meat contractors' 1,500 pesos were then a branch of the city's own propios, so that the vecinos had already been compensated — and that no further advance be asked of the merchants, who would be repaid from the assigned branches. The merchants later supplied more than seventeen thousand pesos beyond the nine, the king approved the terms and ordered the audiencia to thank them, and the public was released from the collection.
The delivered system is described by its outlets, and the list is the best evidence in the chapter of who it was for. The fountain in the plaza mayor first ran on the day of San Antonio de Padua in 1740; it is raised so that "por cinco gradas se sube á recibir la que conducen los vecinos", falling from a basin of burnished bronze, and has four piletas set apart "á prevencion" for the Indians who come in from the pueblos with carts, mules, horses and asses. Public pilas stand at the nuns of Santa Maria de Gracia, the plazuela de Jesus Maria, Santa Teresa, San Francisco and Santo Domingo; ten or twelve private fountains have been put by their owners at their own doors "para que sus vecinos se sirvan de ellas"; water reaches the poor in the royal hospital, the prisoners in the jail, the royal officials in the contaduria, and the muleteers and washerwomen at the city canals. A merced of water for a private house is priced at "500 pesos por cada paja", and that revenue is what funded the extension into the barrios. The distribution is metered and sold at the top and free at the bottom, in the same system.
The chapter closes with a note written for future administrators rather than for readers, and it should be read as the author's own summary of what the exercise taught. Buceta promises, "con el costo solo de 4000 pesos", twice as much water as he has so far gathered, by using the old spring of los Colomos next to Tzapopan — because after the costly experience of prospecting for veins he has learned that the spring can be brought to the basin at far less cost. Mota Padilla adds that he has not wanted to omit the notice "por si en algun tiempo aprovechare". The cheapest source was the one rejected in 1600 on a levelling survey; the expensive groundwater campaign is what taught the engineer that the surface spring was worth reconsidering. The author records the lesson without noticing the irony in it.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 453 to 457 of the 1870 Mexico printing of a manuscript finished in 1742, written by a lawyer resident in the city whose water supply he is describing, in a chapter of praise for the presidents and bishops who built it. No cedula, contract, account or plan was seen; every date, price and quantity here is his. Nothing establishes how much water the system actually delivered, how long the atarjea and the thousand wells stayed serviceable, what the mercedes at 500 pesos a paja yielded, or whether the poor outlets he lists were maintained after the presidents who ordered them moved on. Buceta's earlier Veracruz work is asserted, not shown. The scorpion exorcism reported as fact two chapters earlier in the same book is a fair measure of how the source should be weighted where it is not describing something the author could see for himself in his own city.