Vacha Reservoir

Worth a detour

The road from Krichim to Devin runs for fifteen kilometres beside this reservoir, hard against the rock, and it is one of the better drives in southern Bulgaria. The dam at the lower end is a concrete gravity wall 144 metres high, among the tallest in the country. There is very little at the water's edge — a few jetties and fishing spots — so the drive is the point rather than a destination.

Story

Background

The Vacha comes down off the Rhodope plateau through a narrow, steep valley, and between 1968 and 1975 that valley was dammed twelve kilometres above Krichim. The wall is a concrete gravity structure 144.5 metres high and 420 long, big by any standard and among the highest dams in Bulgaria, holding around 226 million cubic metres in a lake fifteen kilometres long and rarely more than a kilometre and a half wide.

It is part of the Dospat–Vacha cascade, taking water that has already generated power higher up the mountain and dropping it again. Land belonging to Krichim and to several villages upstream went under when it filled.

What this means for a visitor is a road. The Krichim–Devin route runs along the shore, cut into the slope, with the water a long way below and dark green against pale rock. There are places to stop and fish, a handful of small jetties, and not much else. In summer the valley is noticeably cooler than Plovdiv, under an hour away, which is most of why people from the city drive down here at all.