Isaac Moreno Gallo and the edge of Roman engineering on Spanish public TV

Isaac Moreno Gallo: the engineer who made the aqueduct go viral, and the controversy

Civil engineer Isaac Moreno Gallo has spent years bringing Roman engineering to light with a documentary series on TVE, Spain's public broadcaster, which releases a new chapter every 18 months — a pace that says a lot about institutional interest. But in recent weeks his profile has jumped from Roman sewers to the media trenches after associating with people labelled a "pro-Russian traitor" or "conspiracy theorist". The question hanging in the air: could it cost him his job at the public broadcaster?

The series, which began years ago, is technically impeccable. However, it is the periphery of the man that is now making headlines. He has surrounded himself with figures such as a collaborator who denounces the water business and goes after multinationals without holding back — the classic profile that major media outlets stitch up with the label "conspiracy". The irony is that Moreno Gallo himself has spoken out about sea levels: according to him, "the sea level has neither risen nor fallen a single centimetre since Roman times". A claim that, unsurprisingly, has drawn laughter from believers in climate change.

The underlying debate is no small matter: can a science communicator on TVE keep company with "heterodox" discourse without the channel showing him the door? For now, Moreno Gallo seems to care "somewhere between zero and nothing". But in a context where the public broadcaster is under permanent scrutiny, his future on the schedule is uncertain. What is clear is that lovers of Roman hydraulic engineering have a goldmine in his videos; those looking for controversy do too.