Water Management System of Augsburg

Augsburg sits on gravel between two rivers, and that fact explains most of what follows. The Romans pitched a camp here around 15 BC, and the settlement grew into Augusta Vindelicum, capital of the province of Raetia. A pipeline carried water into it over a long distance, yet almost nothing of that system survives, and the Roman baths vanished beneath medieval building. What can still be seen belongs to the last five centuries or so, when the townspeople learned to bend the Lech, the Wertach and the springs of the Stadtwald to their purposes. By 1276 the canals branching off the Lech were already being written into documents, though nobody recorded who dug them first. They drove mills, floated timber, carried waste away and powered the tanneries, dye works and goldsmiths' workshops that kept the city's trades running. The weir at the Hochablass, which sends river water into those canals, is on record from 1346 and was wrecked and rebuilt so often that rebuilding became something of a habit. In 1416 the city opened its first waterworks at the Rotes Tor, and more water towers followed at the Vogeltor and elsewhere, pushing drinking water into town. In 1545 Augsburg set a rule that would later look astonishingly far sighted: drinking water and working water were to be kept strictly apart. Clean water travelled in its own channels from the forest, the Lech canals took everything else, and where the two had to cross, engineers sent one beneath the other. Nobody at the time could explain how dirty water spreads illness. The separation came from careful observation, and hygiene research only caught up with the idea centuries afterwards. Water also became a way of showing off. Between 1594 and 1602 three bronze fountains went up in front of the Town Hall and along the street now called Maximilianstraße, designed by two sculptors who had come from the Netherlands, Hubert Gerhard and Adriaen de Vries. They stood on a dedicated supply line and were meant to be seen, even though they were also working fountains. Just after them, between 1606 and 1609, the city architect Elias Holl built the Stadtmetzg directly over a canal, so that running water kept the butchers' hall cool and carried the waste away. Augsburg's fountain masters acquired a reputation well beyond the city walls. Engineers and scholars travelled to study the machinery, and in 1754 the city's fountain master Caspar Walter published a book called Hydraulica Augustana, which became an early reference for water engineers elsewhere in Europe. Training, drawing and model building turned local know how into something close to an export. The nineteenth century gave the canals a second career. Their current drove the machinery of textile mills and factories, and by the early 1900s the same sites were generating electricity in small power stations along the Lech, Wertach and Singold. Meanwhile the old waterworks were retired. A new works at the Hochablass began supplying the city in 1878, and in 1879 the historic ones at the Rotes Tor, the Vogeltor and the Lower Waterworks were shut down, leaving the towers behind as landmarks. The rivers kept their own timetable. After the Lech flooded in 1910, the weir at the Hochablass was rebuilt in 1911 and 1912, and that is the one standing today. In 1970 the channel next to it, once dug to steer drifting ice away from the waterworks, was rebuilt as a canoe slalom course for the 1972 Summer Olympics, the first artificial whitewater course of its kind. Water engineering had turned, quite unexpectedly, into a sporting venue. Augsburg began its bid for UNESCO status in 2012, and the plan changed on the way: the original title was replaced, the criteria were reshuffled, and inspectors from ICOMOS visited in July 2018. On 6 July 2019 the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Baku, inscribed the Water Management System of Augsburg. Today the Lech still pours over the Hochablass weir, and anyone can walk across its crown with the river dropping away beside them.