The structure, begun in 1537 by Francisco de Arruda and completed only in 1622, extended for eight kilometers from Amoreira to the Fonte da Misericórdia, with superimposed arcades reaching thirty-one meters in height. For a century, successive generations of Elvas residents paid taxes, hauled materials, and laid stone upon stone, knowing they would never see the work completed—they labored so that "the grandchildren of the grandchildren of those who first began to collect and channel it might drink from it." Even during the Restoration Wars, when King João IV considered demolishing the aqueduct for military reasons, the population opposed it and saved the structure, building an underground cistern as an alternative. The aqueduct functions in Ramalho's thought as the perfect antithesis of nineteenth-century liberal modernity. The writer denounces vehemently: "the selfishness of modern times makes us incompatible with the undertaking of such great works." Although the contemporary era boasts of having enshrined through liberal revolution the "dogma of human fraternity," it is "fundamentally incapable" of erecting monuments in service of the common good. The moderns lack the "high notion of patriotic solidarity," the "detachment from material goods," the "abnegation," and above all the "faith of our ancestors." In architecture, "we work solely for ourselves, without care for the future, without thought of continuity of race or family." The Elvas aqueduct thus becomes "the humiliation and shame of our time," incapable of repaying to the future what it owes to the past. Today, visitors can walk along the Amoreira Aqueduct, classified as a National Monument, and observe the four superimposed arcades that still defy gravity and time. Following the water's course from the spring to the city, one is invited to reflect on Ramalho's concept of intergenerational solidarity: those stones were placed by hands that would never see the water flow, for mouths not yet born. Observing with "Ramalho's eyes," one can question what works our own era leaves to those who come after, and whether any of them will testify, like the Elvas aqueduct, to the capacity to think beyond the immediate, building not for ourselves but for the "grandchildren of grandchildren."