ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Upper Harz Water Regale

The Upper Harz Water Regale is a really special system of canals and waterways located in a place called the Harz Mountains in Germany. Now, let's imagine you have a big garden and you want to water your plants with a hose. You need to have one of these fancy sprinklers that spread water evenly on the ground. But sometimes you don't have access to a sprinkler or enough water, and that's when you need to use a smaller watering can.

The same idea goes for the Upper Harz Water Regale. Back in the olden days, people needed water to simply exist, to drink it, and to use it for their daily needs. Because the Harz Mountains are so steep and high, it was hard for people to transport big amounts of water to the villages and towns below. So, people came up with a clever idea. Rather than carry buckets of water, they decided to use gravity!

The people of the Harz Mountains built a series of canals and channels, which helped the water quickly flow down from the top of the mountain, all the way down to the lowest part below. Think of it as one big slide for water! The water would enter a man-made canal at the very top of the mountain, then be transported all the way down to the towns below by flowing downhill.

One important thing to mention is that the people needed to make sure that the water didn't run out too quickly. So, they built dams along the canals to hold water back so that it could be used gradually rather than all at once. By using this system, the people were able to supply water not just to the many towns in the Harz region but also to mines that needed water to operate their machinery.

In the end, the Upper Harz Water Regale is an amazing feat of engineering that allowed the people of the Harz Mountains to have access to water all year round, no matter how high up they lived. Today, people still come to the Harz Mountains to marvel at this incredible work of human ingenuity from the past.