Aqüeducto de San Telmo (Málaga, 1782-1804) — a city water supply owned by a nautical college
The aqueduct that gave Málaga drinking water from 1784, built out of a bishop's estate and crown money diverted from the endowment of the Real Colegio de San Telmo, and in 1804 made over to that college as its own perpetual property. Its printed ordinance opens with a history blaming the shortage on the clearing of the hills after the conquest of 1487, and hands the works to a naval judge.
Why this wins its question: Nothing in English explains why Málaga's eighteenth-century aqueduct is named after a nautical college, and most Spanish accounts treat the engineering without the ownership. This object reads the 1804 ordinance itself and sets out the whole chain: a bishop's private fortune, crown money diverted from an orphan school's endowment, a merchant guild that administered the works for fourteen years and then found them a distraction, a royal order making them the college's perpetual estate, and a naval commander installed as sole judge of the city's water disputes - together with the source's own statement, unusual for 1804, that the shortage began when the hills above the river were cleared after 1487.
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 instrument is printed as ORDENANZA DEL AQÜEDUCTO DEL REAL COLEGIO DE SAN TELMO DE MÁLAGA, APROBADA Y MANDADA OBSERVAR POR EL REY N. SEÑOR, AÑO MDCCCIV, "Por D. Luis de Carreras, Impresor de dicho Real Colegio" - the college had its own press - and opens with an engraved plate signed Mesa and Diez showing St Elmo holding a ship above the royal arms, with a child at a globe and charts between two vessels.
The pamphlet's opening Noticia states a causal environmental history in print. After Málaga was taken in 1487 the lands were shared among the conquerors, who set about clearing them "sin notar que, desquajando los montes y labrando las violentas pendientes que desaguan en Guadalmedina, enterrarian sus aguas y aun la mayor parte de la ciudad las tierras que descendiesen" - deforestation of the slopes silting the river that the city drank from. It records that Málaga had used the Guadalmedina "sin otro cauce que su álveo", that by 1548 the governor Rodrigo de Saavedra had to fall back on other springs which did not meet the need, and that a "magnífico aqüeducto y puente del Rey" begun about 1720 by the governor Gerónimo de Solís y Gante stopped at his early death.
The scheme was a bishop's. The Noticia records the population growing "y con ella la sed y el clamor, y tal vez los delitos, buscando agua á deshoras personas de uno y otro sexô"; that José de Molina Lario, bishop of Málaga, took detailed reports, found the Guadalmedina waters the healthiest and most abundant if taken above the point where the sands swallowed them, and in 1782 laid before the city a project to conduct them, both to give Málaga drinking water and to relieve the vexation caused by shortage of flour.
The work was executed and measured. Water ran inside Málaga in September 1784; by then the bishop was dead and more than two million reales of his rents and espolios, ceded for the purpose by the king, had been consumed on the principal work. The Noticia itemises sixty-nine thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven cubic varas of excavation, one million four hundred and seventy-three thousand cubic feet of masonry at the intake, thirteen thousand varas of drinking-water conduit, a channel of the same length for machines and washing places, thirty bridges, five tunnels, thirty-three ramps, and alcubillas and fountains.
The college paid to finish the city's water. The mills and irrigation were meant to yield "el entretenimiento del aqüeducto y dotacion de la Escuela Náutica", but there were no funds to build them; the commissioners obtained from Carlos III forty thousand ducats and more "de los caudales que de órden de S. M. se destinaban para la ereccion y subsistencia del Real Colegio de San Telmo de Málaga", received through the Real Consulado, on terms that left the product of the works in the college's favour.
The transfer happened in two steps, and the second is the point of the 1804 pamphlet. With the channel roofed, one washing place built and six of the twelve projected mills standing, the commissioners delivered the works to the Real Consulado for administration and conservation in June 1790; the Consulado held them until 1804, when, the charge "habiéndosele hecho gravoso, por distraerlo de otras ocupaciones mas análogas á su instituto", the king resolved that the aqueduct and its ancillary properties "quedasen en finca propia y perpetua del Real Colegio de San Telmo", under royal protection, and willed the ruin then threatening it repaired "y con ella la falta de agua y pan á Málaga".
The ordinance then puts a city utility under naval jurisdiction. Article II makes the Comandante Militar of the city's naval tercio "su Juez privativo y absoluto" for every contentious suit or petition of whatever kind touching the aqueduct or its dependent properties, appeals lying only to the Director general de la Armada "como Protector de los Colegios de San Telmo". Article III charges the college's Director with administering and collecting the aqueduct's products, works, repairs and upkeep on the terms of the San Telmo ordinances, and requires the leases and agreements of the millers, landowners and other water users to be made before him.
The record is mixed and the source says so. Only six of the twelve projected mills were ever built; the aqueduct was threatening ruin within twenty years of first delivering water; the merchant guild that had been given charge of it found the burden a distraction and gave it up; and the whole work rested on a dead bishop's estate and on crown money taken from the endowment of a school for orphans rather than on any municipal revenue. The Noticia is also an interested witness - it was printed by the institution that had just been given the works, and its praise of the bishop and of the commissioners should be read as such.