Puntos de Interés
Hydrography
Canal Gate
Of all the infrastructures built in the territory of Albacete throughout its history, none can compare with the María Cristina Canal.
In the past it was an immense lagoon of pestilential waters in which only disease-carrying insects could be found, which were the scourge of the inhabitants of this town for many years. The Infante Don Juan Manuel initiated the construction of a primitive network of canals and irrigation channels to bring water from the Bazalote river and the Acequión Lagoon.
The work came to a standstill due to lack of funds following bad years for Albacete in which the waters stagnated around the city, the number of farm workers dropped and the land was no longer tilled, people were dying, there were floods and everything suggested that Albacete was doomed to disappear.
King Charles IV saw the situation and decided to start a canalisation project to drain the town and the construction of five suburban watercourses and, with support from Queen Maria Cristina and the economic direction of the minister Antonio Cano, the work was completed.
Along the canals that make up this infrastructure there are various floodgates, hydraulic-mechanical devices that regulate the flow of water along its route. There are different types of floodgates, depending on their design, drive system or the pressures they have to withstand.
In any system of this type, distribution elements play a fundamental role, as distribution allows water resources to reach all the destinations where they are needed in the right quantity. The sluice gates fulfil this function, distributing the water in different conduits.
Along the canals, there are structures made up of cross-sectional walls in masonry or with ashlar facing with metal or wooden gates with upper or lateral winches and metal or wooden traps that allow the gate to be operated to close or open the passage of water.
In 2021, the installation of sluice gates on the spillways of the María Cristina canal was approved to prevent water from entering the canal into the parallel collector and thus prevent an increase in the flow of water through the municipal sewerage network and, therefore, prevent water from reaching the wastewater treatment plant.
One curious detail of this area is that the milestones marking the kilometre points of this nature trail are different from those of the rest of the Nature Trail Network. In this case, instead of showing the plaque on an elongated rectangular piece of wood, a metal element in the shape of a gate has been used, in recognition of the Canal de Maria Cristina and the structures that provide or take away the waters of the canal.