Secrets of Ancient Roman Aqueducts Explained | The Pont du Gard in Nîmes

When I was 12, the family did a trip to the south of France where I got to visit the Pont du Gard, this massive Roman aqueduct. I was 12 at the time. My brother, who's 15, was unafraid of heights and sort of a daredevil, walked across the top of it. And you could fall off of it, it's very dangerous. He said, you should walk across the top of it. The whole visit was a gripping memory in a variety of ways. I was blown away that with ancient means, thousands of years ago, such an incredible structure was built, and that it was built for the sole purpose of moving water. The Romans figured out thousands of years ago that water and economic power and military power were all the same. The Romans built aqueducts as a way to control the empire, and the water was always moving towards centers of innovation or centers of power. Water must be important, and that idea hung with me over the years. So imagine coming up in this 2,000 years ago. Yeah, it's so much bigger. The Pont du Gard Bridge was done in the first century AD from 40 to 60, so five years of construction with the help of 1,000 slaves per day to build the Pont du Gard Bridge, and 15 to 20 for the whole aqueduct of 50 kilometers, 35 miles from Usesse, from the valley where is the spring of Leur to Nîmes. As soon as people came together and started living in groups, they needed a water supply, so they built the local well. But when cities got really crowded, they needed a way to provide people with water beyond what was just available from the local stream or the local groundwater well. The idea being that you could import water from a long distance away and allow lots of people to live in a very small area, and I consider the Romans as the first example of this water revolution. When you want to have a big empire, you have to do wars. Those who did not won the wars but who survived became slaves. The Pont du Gard was built with the help of 1,000 slaves per day. The Romans were master engineers and they built water infrastructure, and as they moved into new territories, they would want to Romanize that territory to make people Romans and to make them part of the empire. One of the ways they would Romanize the territory is to build aqueducts, pipes, fountains, things that would improve the quality of life there so that people would appreciate being Roman. Traveling around Europe, you'll see evidence of the Roman aqueducts even today. Just behind me, it's the arrival of the Spring of Ur, which name was Ura for the Roman people. The spring is coming from very deep underground. It has been built to supply Nîmes with water because Nîmes was a very big city at this time. It was possible to have 20,000 inhabitants in Nîmes during the first century AD. It was the capital of the area, the center of the Roman colony. We know that the Roman people used just gravity to help the water to flow inside the canalization. They needed to have a gentle slope, continued slope, from Usès to Nîmes. Here in Usès, we are at an altitude of 71 meters. The arrival at Nîmes in the Castellum is located at an altitude of 59 meters. For the Romans, the water supply was a symbol of wealth and they celebrated that symbol. At the height of the Roman Empire, there were close to a million people living in the city, and a simple gravity-fed system of bringing water down through aqueducts provided people with not only all the water they needed for drinking, but all the water they needed for bathing and cooking and everything else they wanted to use it for. In fact, in the Roman cities, people had about the same amount of water, 400 liters per person per day, that we currently use in our modern cities.