Havana’s water: a sixteenth-century aqueduct and the cisterns under its courtyards

A Spanish public-works history says that in the first years water reached Havana in barrels and jars carried from the Chorrera and Luyanó rivers, and that households also drew on wells and cisterns. According to a 2022 study by archaeologists and geophysicists, the Zanja Real, an aqueduct of 11 km from the Almendares River, supplied the town from 1592; the history adds that the river is also called the Chorrera and that the engineer Juan Bautista Antonelli finished the works that year. The history traces the aqueduct’s route past the Santa Teresa convent, between Teniente Rey and Compostela streets, to the Callejón del Chorro. The study reports that one branch was uncovered in front of the Hostal Los Frailes on Teniente Rey and that its historic course is displayed there. The history also says that the Zanja Real served as the town’s only aqueduct from 1592 to 1835.[2][1]

The Spanish history places the end of the Zanja Real in the Callejón del Chorro, beside Plaza de la Catedral, where ships took on water, and says the aqueduct also fed fountains in the Plaza Nueva and the Plazuela de San Francisco, where residents came with carts and empty barrels. On the plaza itself, the Casa del Marqués de Arcos has two fronts: one on Mercaderes street, one of round arches facing the plaza. Inside it connects with the Casa del Conde Lombillo, enlarged in 1741. At the Casa del Conde Lombillo, where the survey covered the courtyard and the corridor on the south side, ground-penetrating radar found a structure six metres by six, which the authors read as possibly a collapsed cistern with only its outer walls left.[2][1]

The study says Plaza Vieja began as the Plaza Nueva in the early seventeenth century. From the late seventeenth century, wealthy owners built stone cisterns under their courtyards to hold rain from the roofs, and the study cites a housing census of 1899 as recording cisterns in 46% of Havana’s dwellings. At the Casa de los Condes de San Juan de Jaruco (built in 1737, on Muralla street at San Ignacio), radar showed a stone structure 3 to 4 m wide in the south-west corner of the courtyard, matching a cistern that remains covered under the paving. In the Casa de los Condes de San Esteban de Cañongo (1816, on San Ignacio between Teniente Rey and Muralla) the survey found no sign of one. Earlier archaeological evidence suggests the site lies over remains of the Zanja Real, and the authors ask whether building the house in the nineteenth century had already made a cistern unnecessary.[1]