Peñol–Guatapé Reservoir
Embalse Peñol-Guatapé
Interesting facts
- The water drops through a pressure tunnel to a cavern power station about 400 metres underground, five kilometres east of the lake, with a head of some 810 metres.
- The plant runs eight vertical Pelton turbines of 70 MW each and generates on average around 2,730 GWh of electricity a year.
- The branching reservoir stretches up to about 15 km, sits at roughly 1,880 metres above sea level and can store some 1,070 million cubic metres of water.
- After a cable fire in 2016, about 30 km of replacement cable was flown in from Mexico City on eight Antonov An-124 flights to restart the plant.
- The Tahamí people who once lived here revered the great rock above the reservoir and called it mojarrá, meaning stone.
- The Peñón de Guatapé has an estimated volume of about 22 million cubic metres, which works out at some 66 million tonnes of granite.
- Luis Eduardo Villegas, one of the three first climbers, bought the rock from farmers who considered it useless land, and his family still owns it.
- A bronze statue of Villegas, the first man to reach the summit, was unveiled at the foot of the rock in 2008.
- The rock is part of the Antioquia Batholith, and geologists explain its smooth dome by decompression as overlying rock eroded away, as with Rio's Sugarloaf.
Why it is worth it
The Peñol–Guatapé reservoir is a landscape made by flooding, and it shows. When Empresas Públicas de Medellín dammed the Nare River in eastern Antioquia in two stages, finished in 1972 and 1979, the water did not fill a single basin but crept into dozens of valleys among steep green hills. The result is a maze of inlets, peninsulas and wooded islands spread over about 74 km², the largest body of water in the department, with a shoreline so convoluted that from above it looks less like a lake than like a flooded map. The reservoir feeds a hydroelectric system of some 560 MW and is the most heavily regulated in Colombia.
The price of the scenery was a town. The old municipality of El Peñol was demolished and its people moved to a new settlement built on higher ground, while farms around both El Peñol and Guatapé were also given up; roughly a quarter of Guatapé's territory now lies under water. From the water, the reservoir's calm hides the fact that streets and fields lie beneath it.
The best way to understand the reservoir is from above, and the obvious vantage point is the Peñón de Guatapé, a granite monolith about 65 million years old that rises some 200 m from its base at the water's edge. A zigzag staircase of 708 steps, fitted into a fissure in the rock face, leads to the summit, from where the islands and channels unfold in every direction. The first recorded climb, in July 1954, took three local men five days using wooden poles wedged into the crack. On the western face, a giant white G and a stroke of a U are left over from an attempt by Guatapé residents to paint the town's name on the rock, abandoned when neighbours from El Peñol, who also claimed it, objected. Below, the town of Guatapé is known for the brightly painted relief panels, or zócalos, that run along the base of its houses, and boats set off from its waterfront into the reservoir.
Getting there
The reservoir lies in eastern Antioquia; the town of El Santuario is about 16 km away, and Guatapé sits on its shore roughly 80 km by road from Medellín. José María Córdova International Airport (MDE) at Rionegro, which serves Medellín, is about 28 km away in a straight line. Direct buses run from Medellín's Terminal del Norte to Guatapé and to the foot of the Peñón, a journey of about two hours.
On these lists
6.26100, -75.19000per Wikidata