Tenerife - Elevador de Aguas de Gordejuala

This picturesque piece of local history can be found west of Puerto de la Cruz on Tenerife. A freshwater spring was once situated on this site, cascading down the cliffs and into the sea - initially too low to be useful for the irrigation of banana plantations further up the slope. In 1902, the Hamiltons of Santa Cruz undertook a project to build a steam-powered pump station that would capture the freshwater from the spring and pump it up to the plantations of the Orotava Valley. It was opened in 1905 and would move 4,800 cubic metres of water every day. With oil and electrical power being brought to Tenerife in the coming decades, however, the pump was not cost efficient to run and was sold in 1919 and entirely abandoned by 1940. The model was assembled from a total of about 350 drone and DSLR photos, using RealityCapture and Houdini to generate the final model. Keeping a balance between file size and detail was tricky with this capture - I wanted to preserve both graffiti detail and the surroundings.