Aosta · Italy

The rus

This is one of the driest districts in the Alps. The floor of the Aosta valley receives less rain than certain near-arid regions, because the mountains around it arrest the weather from every direction. People have farmed here nonetheless, and the reason runs along the mountainside above you. The rus are irrigation channels cut in the Middle Ages to capture meltwater from the glaciers far higher up and carry it, at the gentlest of gradients, down to the fields and the vines. Some extend for tens of kilometres, clinging to rock faces, and in places the channel is cut into the living rock. They were built by hand, by communities that organised themselves to do it, and they are maintained still, in turn, by those entitled to the water. Many are footpaths now: you walk on the level, beside the water, with the valley below you.

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How dry is the valley really?

The valley floor around Aosta receives approximately five hundred millimetres of rain a year, less than many Mediterranean areas. It is a rain-shadow effect: the ranges all around drop their precipitation before it reaches here.

How was a ru built?

With a shovel, a pick and enormous patience, following a gradient so slight that the water runs without cutting into the channel. Where the rock was vertical they hung wooden troughs on the face. Some rus are more than six hundred years old and the line has never changed.

Who decides who gets the water?

The consortia, associations of landowners that have existed for centuries and allocate the turns for watering. They are among the oldest and most continuous institutions in the valley: they manage a common resource under rules written long before anyone had a word for it.

Where it is

Signayes, 11100 Aosta · 45.75454, 7.31741 · Open in Maps

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