Lake Rabisha

Worth a detour

Three and a quarter square kilometres of water sitting in a tectonic hollow with almost no catchment and no outflow — a genuine oddity, and for a long time wrongly classed as a karst lake. It lies at the foot of the Rabisha mound, and Magura Cave is inside that hill, so most people arrive for the cave and find the lake. Swimming and fishing are what happens here.

Story

Background

The lake lies between the villages of Rabisha and Tolovitsa at the western edge of the Predbalkan, ten to fifteen metres deep and holding around forty-three million cubic metres. Drilling has shown a floor of impermeable marl, sandstone and clay under modern silt, which is why the water stays where it is. It has no natural outlet at all.

Local belief held for generations that the lake was bottomless and fed the karst spring above the village of Rabisha, half a kilometre away and lower down — a reasonable inference from a spring that gushes and a lake that never drains, and one the geology has not supported.

It is also no longer purely natural. A dam wall nearly thirteen metres high was raised at the western end and the lake was absorbed into the Rabisha irrigation system, taking water from the Vidbol and the Archar. It is stocked and fished for carp, grass carp, silver carp, pike and catfish, and it swims well in summer. There is not much infrastructure and that is most of its appeal.