Sunol Water Temple
In a canyon in Northern California sits the classic marble pavilion, the Sunol Water Temple. Built in 1910 by a private water company, it now belongs to the municipality of San Francisco.
More than half of San Francisco’s water used to pass through Sunol. Now most of the Bay Area’s water comes from the Hetch Hetchy Water System nearly one-hundred-and-sixty miles away in the Yosemite valley.
Hetch Hetchy Water System
Pulgas Water Temple
Another water temple, this one made of cast stone, is on the other side of the San Francisco Bay. Twenty-four years younger than its Sunol counterpart, the Pulgas Water Temple (in Redwood City) was built by the municipality of San Franciso to commemorate the completion of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct. Compared to the water temples of Bali, however, these two are babes, aged as they are at seventy-eight (Pulgas) and one-hundred-and two years (Sunol).
Balinese Water Temples
There is an ancient ritual of water management – irrigation – that has been practiced on the volcanic slopes of Bali for over a thousand years. This is subak, a custom built around water temples. It is/was at the heart of Balinese rice paddy/terrace farming. I wonder what materials are used to make these water temples. With their subdued color they blend into the landscape in a way that the California ones don’t.
The Essence of Subaks
In the subak system, priests apportioned the water for farming. Different communities (subaks) planted their crops at different times and allowed their paddies to go fallow simultaneously. Rotating the cultivation was an effective means of distributing and conserving water; letting fields go completely fallow controlled pests.
Challenges to the System
The thousand year old subak system came under pressure when Asia embraced the Green Revolution in the 1970s. Conflicts between government agencies and subaks, plus a steady increase in tourism, significantly altered the Balinese landscape. In 1999 there was about 1,500 subaks on Bali (with about two-hundred members each), covering an irrigated area of more than 90,000 ha.* In 2012 when UNESCO gave subaks its national heritage designation, there were five rice terraces (and their water temples) covering 9,500 ha.** Although some of these changes can be attributed to post-colonial migration, much of it is due to the pressures of tourism on land use. Today, the remaining subaks still meet at water temples to discuss community farming decisions.
*Traditional Water Management in Bali, by Suarja and Thijssen, 1999.
**Cultural Landscape of Bali Province, UNESCO, 2012.
Bay Area Adventures at WeWereNothing.org 
That Pulgas Water Temple sure looks dated in a quaint way. I think the content of this post is unique.
Thanks for visiting Kristin. Yes, these water temples are pretty and quaint but so out of character in the California landscape. In Boston and New York they seem right at home; ditto in Europe. Is it that time/age makes the East Coast and European ones more at home in their surroundings? Then again, Filoli Gardens out in Woodside (Bay Area) has this kind of architecture; it somehow fits right in with the mountain landscape.