Kardzhali Reservoir

Worth a detour

The wall is the thing: 103 metres of concrete arch-gravity dam, a type unusual in Bulgaria, standing directly above Kardzhali with the town living underneath it. Behind it the Arda backs up for twenty kilometres through bare volcanic country that looks nothing like the rest of Bulgaria. Twenty-four villages went under when it filled. Nothing is laid on for visitors; you look at it from the road.

Story

Background

Building started in 1957 and the dam went into service in 1963, though work on the wider scheme continued into the 1970s. The design is a concrete arch-gravity wall, 103.5 metres high and 344 long — unusual here, where most of the big dams are earth or straight gravity structures — and the engineering was difficult enough that Soviet and French specialists were brought in when unstable rock and faulting threatened to stop the job.

What it holds back is about 497 million cubic metres of the Arda, spread over thirteen and a half square kilometres and reaching twenty kilometres upstream. Twenty-four villages in the Kardzhali and Ardino districts were flooded. The station beneath the wall runs four turbines for 106 megawatts, and this is the uppermost of the three big dams on the Arda.

For a visitor the appeal is the landscape rather than the engineering. This is the Eastern Rhodopes: low, dry, volcanic, with rhyolite outcrops standing over green water and very few trees. Side arms of the lake run back into the hills and are best seen from the shore road or the ridge above the wall. Late light is when this country works — the rock goes orange and the water goes black.