Learning from the Past: What Cultural Heritage Can Teach Us About Water Storage and Management

Abstract

Due to increasing water crisis, water security is becoming more and more mainstream and associated with the Sustainable Development Goals and the human right to water. Water supply, especially for households, becomes more and more challenging. Looking to the past, several water-harvesting techniques implemented around the world since ancient times can be found and they were succeeded to deal with water scarcity and to promote food and water security. Their replacement by modern techniques not always represents a sustainable solution. The future challenge is to go further, through an integrative vision that minimizes the environmental impacts of water use techniques, and the possibility of learning from the past. In this context, the solutions can be a combination between culture and traditional knowledge, with modern water technology and its management.We propose looking at this issue considering ancient techniques for harvesting and storing water for human supply in small villages, under a pedagogical attitude of learning how to emphasize the relationship between nature processes and society, from the perspective of Ecosystem services. Different techniques were analyzed, considering the magnitude of the infrastructure, the distance to the source, and the type of water source. A classification framework of ancient water systems was designed. Then, careful attention was paid to the existing hydraulic heritage of the living Monsaraz medieval village, located in the south of Portugal, as an example. The resultant analysis considers both ancient water-harvesting and water-storage techniques in an urban context so that they could positively answer the contemporary challenge of transforming water-scarce into water-secure villages, with a focus on rainwater harvesting.