This study deals with the assessment of the transport parameters of the Escherichia coli ATCC11229 bacteria, a fecal contamination indicator, through saturated quartz sand columns. With this purpose, it was developed an equipment to carrying out Advection-Dispersion-Sorption (ADS) experiments, with continuous input of bacterial distilled water suspension at an influent concentration of 10(8) cell/mL for about twelve hours, at environmental temperature and under conditions that allow disregard the effect of the growth and decay of the microorganisms. Microbiological experiments, batch tests, and eight ADS experiments at several hydraulic gradient values, were executed for determine the transport parameters. The batch tests indicated a low bacterium-soil adsorption under evaluated conditions. The breakthrough curves, obtained by ADS experiments, showed high values for the retardation factor, ranged from three to nine with increasing the hydraulic gradient. The hydrodynamic dispersion values ranged between 1,44x10(-2)cm(2)/min and 5,47x10(-2) cm(2)/min. The results of the experiments suggested that the physical-chemical processes have a little influence on the transport of this microorganism in quartz sand, whereas the straining process, hydrodynamic forces, the shape and grain distribution, would can explain more appropriately the behavior of the breakthrough curves.