Watch out! Don't fall in the ditch.

As mendocina as the scraped torita or the hill Aconcagua. The ditch is part of our culture and idiosyncrasy. We Mendoza are born knowing what the ditches are. Scenario of the most fun games of our childhood. Receptacle of the most unpleasant garbage that people dispose of as if it were a container. Substantial element for the development of our society.

From millennial origins, ditches are neither more nor less that small, tiny, streams or rivers artificial that cross the length and breadth of our city. The target? Accomplish efficient use of the scarce water that can be obtained in this desert.

They are an inescapable component of a postcard of the City of Mendoza. Street, cord, ditch and sidewalk. It's never missing. However, it is not common for visitors. On the contrary, what is usual is the whistles of tourists who, crossing the street, completely forget their existence and take a confident step forward, without finding a bottom. Or, rather, finding it a meter lower than calculated. Then, the fall and the consequent injury becomes even more terrible if water is running down the ditch right now. Complete combo.

They are not a container of garbage

The ditches receive water from the main canals that enter our city, and through them the water resources are distributed, not for consumption (as it was in its origins), but for irrigation. Even the water of rain also runs through its channels. However, the “man” factor is a stone in the shoe of the same man. It is that, many times, when it rains (something that does not happen very followed here), the ditches are waterlogged and overridden by the rubbish. waste and waste that the same people throw into them, like a container of Garbage. And, while Mendoza is a relatively clean city, these attitudes muddy the positive image we once formed in this regard.

Its origins

The Mendoza water system of canals and ditches has its origin in theHuarpeculture prexistente to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the mid-16th century - Yeah . It also has cultural and historical links with the Inca Empire, which had, precisely, its southernmost point in Mendoza.

The primary function of the ditches and canals of Mendoza was to provide drinking water to the houses of the young city and also to irrigate courtyards and family gardens. This situation spread to the surrounding agricultural suburb.

For more than three hundred years the ditches had these functions. From 1872 it was redesigned the system, proposing the current method of ditches parallel to the roadway. With the arrival of the drinking water system from 1876, the function of providing drinking water to the lots of the post-remote city became unnecessary.

Therefore, seeing that there were ditches in the City New, it was thought to use them to irrigate trees that were planted to its vera from 1876, not as mistakenly believed, that the ditches appeared to water the new street grove.