Dam of the Ermita de la Virgen del Pilar
| Dam of the Ermita de la Virgen del Pilar | |||||
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| Coordinates | 41 ° 4 ′ 39 " N , 1 ° 0 ′ 33" W | ||||
| Data on the structure | |||||
| Lock type: | Gravity dam | ||||
| Construction time: | 1st – 2nd Century AD | ||||
| Height of the barrier structure : | 16.6 m | ||||
| Crown length: | 80 m | ||||
| Base width: | 6.9 m | ||||
The dam of Ermita de la Virgen del Pilar was a Roman dam on the territory of the Spanish municipality of Monforte de Moyuela in the province of Teruel in Aragon . The few remaining remains allow a very detailed reconstruction of the barrier structure built as a gravity dam in the 1st century .
Accordingly, the dam was expanded in two phases. First, in the steeply sloping valley of the Río Santa Maria, a tributary of the Río Moyuela, a dam wall about 52 meters long and 14 meters high was constructed. The 6.90 meter thick construction consisted on the one hand of a 4.30 meter wide wall on the valley side, which was clad with house stones and filled with rubble stones in mortar. On the other hand, there was a 2.60 meter wide formwork made of opus quadratum on the water side , which was filled with opus caementitium about 1 meter thick along the inner shell , while the rest of the filling towards the opus quadratum consisted of small-scale material mixed with mortar. The approximately 5.90 meter wide wall crown of this first phase had a floor made of neatly laid stones.
About 50 years after the construction of this first structure, the dam wall was increased by about 2.60 to 16.60 meters. For this purpose, an approximately 5.40 meter wide, double-shell wall in opus incertum was placed on the original wall crown , which was filled with mortar and rubble stones. This measure increased the length of the dam to around 86 meters. The capacity of the reservoir has been increased from around 250,000 cubic meters to 450,000 cubic meters.
With a base width of 6.90 meters and a height of 16.60 meters, the construction was very unstable, assuming a ratio of 2: 3 for gravity dams as sufficient to withstand the water pressure, but above all the sediment pressure. The dam of Ermita de la Virgen del Pilar seems to have stood for only about another 50 years before it collapsed under the pressure of the sediments washed up.
The function of the dam is completely unclear, as there was no Roman settlement or city in its vicinity that it could have contributed to supplying. Also villas or latifundia of a corresponding period are not known from the area, so that a use for irrigation regulation cannot be inferred.
literature
- Miguel Arenillas, Juan C. Castillo: "Dams from the Roman Era in Spain. Analysis of Design Forms (with appendix)" , in: Santiago Huerta (Ed.): Proceedings of the First International Congress on Construction History: Madrid, 20th– 24th January 2003 , Instituto Juan de Herrera, Madrid 2003, ISBN 84-9728-070-9
- Miguel Arenillas Parra, J. Iñigo Hereza Domínguez, Carmen Díaz-Guerra Jaén, Rafael Cortés Gimeno: La presa romana de la Ermita del Pilar (Monforte de Moyuela, Teruel) . In: Revista de obras publicas . Volume 152, number 3456, 2005, pp. 55-62 ( online ; PDF; 681 kB).