The Alqueva Dam

The Alqueva Dam is the largest artificial lake in Europe. It lies between the districts of Beja and Évora and the water comes from the Guadiana river which has been turned into a water reservoir when they built an arch dam between the village of Alqueva (from where the dam got it's name) and the city of Moura. The size is of about 250 square km and it took about 50 years to finish the building project. The main idea was to stop the desertification of the area and help out with the agriculture which had stagnated and yielded very low profit. In January 2002 they could finally start filling the dam.

This dam has completely transformed the original landscape, now it is green, lush and full of life. Before it was quite a barren stretch of meager soils, not good enough to produce wheat, and the name Alqueva means "deserted". The fresh water changes everything, you can notice that specifically on the wide range of birds, we saw for example many cranes during our round tour. A pair of binoculars might help in spotting even more bird species.

There was one village which became almost completely inundated, the village of Luz. They built a completely new village on higher ground and also a museum in order to tell the story of how the village looked like before ending at the bottom of the dam. Some archaeological remains where also relocated, such as the stone circle and menhir of Cromeleque do Xerez, which was taken from it's original place and placed outside the village of Monsaraz.

This is now the biggest water reserve in Portugal which also produces huge amounts of electricity to the neighboring municipalities. It is possible to navigate on the river Guadiana until reaching the town of Mértola, famous for it's natural reserve, wildlife and many Roman archaeological remains among other things. You can also spend a day fishing, hunting, hiking (do check which trails are ok to hike on since many are within the hunting areas and you do not want to end up with a bullet in your ****), horseback riding, going by balloon/helicopter/plane over the water or swim and sunbathe on the beach.