Centinela Springs

The Aguaje de Centinela, or Centinela Springs, was a valued source of local spring water for Rancho Aguaje de la Centinela and what is now southwest Los Angeles and Inglewood in Southern California. The spring was known to prehistoric people and animals but the name '' aguaje'', meaning watering place, comes from Spanish–Mexican era of California history.

Hydrology/history

The springs were “known to the Indians from ancient times,” and the Mexican land grant of 1837 that encompassed the land that is today Inglewood was named after the springs, the “sentinel of waters,” thus Rancho Aguaje de la Centinela. (''Aguaje'' here means “water hole.”)

The spring water was used for watering livestock and agriculture during most of the 19th century. In early days, “Water was once diverted from the runoff of Centinela Springs, from the big draw, along Grevillea Street, as far as Olive Street and thence to Oak Street. The canal was lined with willows, and the stream was used to water sheep.”

According to a history of groundwater management in the west basin region of Los Angeles, “In the late 1800s, ground water levels were very high, with heavy artesian flow from wells and swampy conditions in low-lying lands. Around 1870, the West Basin communities of Inglewood and Long Beach began to tap artesian wells and springs in the area of the Newport-Inglewood Uplift.” According to a latter-day Inglewood water engineer, “The largest Centinela spring was located near the present site of the swimming pool” at Centinela Park.

Circa 1887, ”Colonel W.H. Hall, ex-state engineer, has discovered by experimenting than an extensive artesian belt underlies the country between Los Angeles and Centinela Springs, and solves the problem that water can be obtained in this section by artesian wells.” The springs were described in an 1888 California state report on the “irrigation question”:

:“South and west of the main crest of the Centinela hills, at the head of an arroyo which, cutting into their western slope, leads around three or four miles into Ballona Creek, opposite the irrigation district just described, is an uprising of waters known as the Centinela Springs. This is probably an output of the same general artesian source lying east of the ridge, caused by the overlapping of some of the permeable gravel strata through a low sag in the primary formation. Indeed, borings, which have been made, quite well establish this idea.

:“''Water-supply and use—''The springs naturally flowed twenty to thirty miner’s inches, and have recently been developed to yield something over fifty inches, as explained elsewhere. The waters were, for a number of years, used in a comparatively rude fashion in the irrigation of a mixed orchard, containing about one hundred and forty acres [], near a mile [] away, and to which they were led in a little earthen ditch. Now they are piped into a reservoir and in part pumped to a higher reservoir for the service, under pressure, of the town of Inglewood.”

Also in 1888 an Inglewood booster wrote the ''Los Angeles Herald'' of a “tunnel near Centinela Springs…being dug to tap additional springs, which have been located by the engineers.”

An 1890 report to the U.S. Congress said the springs had been developed by “excavation and artesian wells.” Daily capacity at that time was 900,000 U.S. gallons?">U.S._gallon_per_day.html" ;"title="o units listed; U.S. gallon per day">U.S. gallons? A book about California produced for the World's Columbian Exposition">1893 World's Fair