The Palace of Running Water

Museo del Patrimonio Histórico at the Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes (Palace of Running Water)

Av. Córdoba 1750, Buenos Aires
Museum entrance at Riobamba 750, 1st floor

Click here for photo slideshow: Palace of Running Water

Avenida Córdoba is an often used thoroughfare, so although many tourist pass by this grandiose Baroque structure, most miss this attraction because the entrance is around the corner at Riobamba 750. In addition, although residents pay their water bills on the first floor, the museum is only open Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 9-noon.

The building construction began in 1887 and was completed in 1897. Norwegian designer Olaf Boye was responsible for the building's design; the English construction company Bateman-Parsons and Bateman took responsibility for construction. The façade is made up of over 170,000 tiles and more than 130,000 enamel bricks, as well as glazed castings of the coat of arms of the fourteen provinces and the capital, which at that time made up the Republic of Argentina . The ocher and blue-greenish terracotta glazed tiles were made by Royal Doulton and shipped in crates from Britain. Each tile was numbered, corresponding to it's exact placement on the building. Located at the highest point of the city (such as it is in this incredibly flat city), El Palacio de Aguas Corrientes was built as a disguise for what was essentially a water tower meant to provide clean, drinking water to the locals following the yellow fever epidemic of 1877.

Water was collected from the river, off the shore of Belgrano, and diverted through canals to Recoleta, where it was pumped to El Palacio. Twelve metal tanks inside stored 72 million liters of water. Today the equipment is defunct and the building serves as the headquarters of the water company Aguas Argentinas. It also is home to the waterworks museum that has hundreds of toilets collected from across the world as well as a library, drawings, antique sanitary artifacts, models and other materials on waterworks across the globe.

Prior to the construction of the distributed municipal plumbing system, water was collected and held in pools and containers in individual homes. In the mid-1800's water was literally sold in buckets to homeowners, brought from the river, full of silt. These conditions helped spread disease. Because the new water storage building was located in an area that was being populated by the city’s wealthy families and their mansions, the building was meant to complement the surrounding architecture and as a monument to what was a world class city.

An excerpt from the book "Far Away and Long Ago" by W. H. Hudson provides a clear, first hand description of the situation around 1870:

" . . . the principal and sublime stench in a city of evil smells, a populous city built on a plain without drainage and without water-supply beyond that which was sold by watermen in buckets, each bucketful containing about half a pound of red clay in solution. It is true that the best houses had _algibes,_ or cisterns, under the courtyard, where the rainwater from the flat roofs was deposited. I remember that water well: you always had one or two to half-a-dozen scarlet wrigglers, the larvae of mosquitoes, in a tumblerful, and you drank your water, quite calmly, wrigglers and all!

All this will serve to give an idea of the condition of the city of that time from the sanitary point of view, and this state of things lasted down to the 'seventies of the last century, when Buenos Ayres came to be the chief pestilential city of the globe and was obliged to call in engineers from England to do something to save the inhabitants from extinction."