Apparently it also reached Portugal

@@Francisco-oc3ld Yes, I confirm, from the Spanish west, the step is short!

To continue with the identification of animals/insects seen ... the dragonfly at 13:25 is Cordulegaster boltonii ... a female laying eggs in that tine stream of water ... oh and the newt is also a female.

I guess this is exactly what he has done.

Yes and use stones and cement!

@@ericpillon2965 not properly but it still works. To be efficient it need at least two walls inside the chamber that make some particular flow lettig the water pass on the top while the heavier particels goes down

Don't put plants in your stonework !

Can't quite tell from watching the video, but I hope you used a lime based mortar rather than a cement based one. Lime based mortar allows stonework to breathe. If there's freezing weather, it's much less prone to cracking as water can get in & crucially, out again. Whereas cement based mortars lock moisture in, and when it expands as ice does, it can damage both the mortar and stonework itself. Usage of cement based mortars with stonework is a common, & sometimes tedious & expensive mistake, as damage often occurs, requiring remedial works.

I think they snuck on to it and started building this all on their own 😊😊

as it did originally

Probably you are right, over time the weight of the soil in the hill will push in against the wall and could break it. So all future builders of walls against hills, keep this in mind 😉

@@vale.do.salgueiro you could consider adding internal abutments? you'd loose some water volume but might stabilize it for a little longer? You've done a fantastic job of rebuilding it.

We left two little "doors" to get in from the top if necessary.

Thanks for the hint. I only found out a bit later why I had used so much force, the drill was completely blunt. Only used it for a few times. Now with a better quality drill it works much better as you describe.

@@vale.do.salgueiro You have granite - it wears those carbide tips out superfast ;)

But the video is in Portugal not in USA 🤔🤔

Boa noite! One option is to get some additive like for example this one prt.sika.com/content/dam/dms/pt01/d/sikalatex_.pdf We found it was too expensive to use it for all the walls, so we only used it for the gaps between the stones of the existing walls. It was quite hard to get this watertight, because the old cement over time formed cracks, so we had to redo a lot of the gaps. All in all the tank is also not 100% water tight and probably never will be. Especially because we did not seal the floor. Here we just relied on the clay that was already there forming a water resistant layer. As we have always inflow from the spring we are fine with a few holes here and there

Portugal, maybe in the North.

Sim é no norte de Portugal

It looks like they are millionaires if they can toil with such nonsense...

Yep you are right, that is why we also used some metal rods to join the stones in the other video. They are a bit hard to see, but good point to remember for anyone who wants to build something similar.