What to do and see in Province of Tarragona, Catalonia: The Best Bridges

Reviewed By VadimM67 - Murmansk, Russia

The Roman aqueduct in Tarragona was my fifth aqueduct after the Valens in Istanbul, the aqueduct in Segovia, the Aqua Appia in Rome, and the famous Pont du Gard near Nimes. The aqueduct of Tarragona or the devil's bridge certainly did not get on the 5-Euro bill like the Pont du Gard, but it is the most picturesque I have seen, even if not the largest. Getting to the Devil's bridge is easy. You need to take the 5 or 85 bus on the ring at the bus station. The aqueduct Park is just 5 km from Tarragona. After getting off at the bus stop of the same name, go right for another 500 meters. And here it is: Wow! There are two things I admire most about Roman aqueducts. The ability of engineers to calculate the slope for many kilometers and the ability of builders to accurately perform it. This is the art of leading water (from Latin: aqua — water and ducere-lead).Roman engineers could determine the slope with an accuracy of 0.1 degrees — that is, 1 m of slope per 1 km of aqueduct. It is not easy to implement this in practice, so to avoid changing the angle of inclination, special reservoirs were created that accumulate and equalize water. The water trough is preserved in the aqueduct here. You can see it if you climb to the top. In fact, it was not necessary to build an aqueduct of this size. It would be possible to lay siphon pipes to the bottom of the gorge, following its profile and then lift it up to a height just below the original level. This is called a hydraulic gradient. Why did the Romans prefer to build giant aqueducts? The size is disorienting. We think if bigger and more massive means more expensive. However, pipes (lead pipes) have cost the Romans more expensive than bridges. Masonry was cheap, due to the cheapness of stone, brick, and mortar. Only if the depth of the gorges was great, the Romans stretched pipes to the bottom,and then up. In our case, the aqueduct is 27 meters high. The water was taken from the Rourell area, 92 metres above sea level, and carried more than ten kilometres The grandiose structure could not but cause mystification in the middle ages, when the Visigoths, and then the Spaniards lost the ability to build such structures. They named the aqueduct the devil's bridge, linking it with the legend that the devil will take the soul of the person who enters the bridge first. Local residents let a donkey on the bridge first... The donkey is not Faust, its soul is not interesting. Now you can walk on the bridge as you like. This is probably the most accessible aqueduct I've ever seen.