Calle Acueducto

A few steps from this street a brick skeleton of seventeen round arches survives: the Amaniel aqueduct. Calle Acueducto points to it from the street map, and to understand the name you have to look at that mass of some 120 meters winding between the blocks of Bellas Vistas. The structure belongs to the undertaking launched around 1851 by the minister Juan Bravo Murillo: bringing water from the Lozoya to a Madrid growing without enough fountains. More than seventy kilometers of conduit fed the Canal de Isabel II, whose waters reached the city in 1858. This stretch, built around 1857 on a triple brick gallery, spanned the hollow down which Calle de Pablo Iglesias now runs. Time has not been kind to it. Work on the neighboring street damaged its arches, and the structure ended up half-buried and hemmed in between buildings, all but hidden from anyone who does not know to look for it.