Botanical Glossary - Home

The head of the irrigation system starts here at the Textile Mill Power Plant. Water is skillfully diverted through underground channels to be directed through Pectin wheels generating enough power to supply the Textile Mill in San Sebastian. The new Cultural Arts Center has been established in the creatively remodeled textile factory which was originally built in the 1800s.

You can see the plaster glazing on the walls has been knocked off in places to show the adobe brick structure underneath. The Power Plant isn't boarded up or otherwise cordoned off from the public. It is slowly deteriorating and will eventually become unsafe - The building is English style, Colonial Industrial architecture and is slowly crumbling with help from locals who sometimes carve graffiti into the walls inside and out. Flywheels and Generator cores litter the floor of the Power Plant inside. The cement boxes in the foreground are where water flowed through turbines.

Looking overhead, the only roof is a corrugated sheet metal covering designed to divert the monsoon rains and reflect the merciless sunshine.

This is part of a 3 kilometer canal that has been built and maintained for the past few hundred years, effectively routing water from the river in the El Rio Valley. Gravity dictates that the mouth of the canal must be higher than the storage tanks; The canal has a slow but constant drop with no falls or dams, an ancient engineering feat that will last for many decades into the future.

This canal system has turned the El Rio Valley and surrounding area into a lush, well irrigated paradise that thousands of local farmers and residents enjoy.

The El Rio valley ends in San Sebastian, but the fresh water river continues on through the Etla/Oaxaca Valley and flows into the City of Oaxaca.

The Irrigation reservoir is where water is stored from the canal. The water storage comes to the main tank first, which is in turn used to fill up the small tanks. The smaller tanks are emptied on a rotating basis, siphoned off to lower canals which are directed to the canals that lead to individual farms of San Agustin, Vista Hermosa, and San Sebastian. The surrounding villages all benefit from this irrigation system which hasn't changed much in hundreds of years.