Lake Ritsa
Interesting facts
- The lake is geologically very young: it is thought to have formed only about 250 years ago, when part of Mount Pshegishkha collapsed into the Lashipse river.
- Its average depth is about 63 metres, remarkable for a lake only 2.5 kilometres long.
- In winter the lake freezes only thinly, with ice usually just 1 to 5 centimetres thick, while the surface water stays a few degrees above zero.
- Snow around the lake normally lies 2 to 3 metres deep, and in severe winters it can pile up to 7 to 11 metres.
- The water level rises and falls by 2 to 3 metres over the year as the feeding rivers swell and shrink.
- Besides trout, the lake holds whitefish and chub.
- The Ritsa Nature Reserve around the lake covers about 163 square kilometres of mountain forest and meadow.
- The basin is very wet, receiving roughly 2,000 to 2,200 millimetres of rain and snow a year.
- Lake Ritsa resort featured on a Soviet postage stamp issued in 1947.
Why it is worth it
Lake Ritsa lies in a deep forested gorge of the western Caucasus in Abkhazia, about 950 metres above sea level, hemmed in by mountains that rise to more than 3,000 metres. The water is cold and very clear, and its colour shifts with the seasons, from a greenish-yellow in spring and summer to a cold blue in autumn and winter, as the clarity of the inflowing rivers and the growth of microscopic algae change through the year.
The lake is about 2.5 kilometres long and between roughly 270 and 870 metres wide, covering some 1.5 square kilometres, and with a maximum depth of 116 metres it is the deepest lake in Abkhazia. It sits in the basin of the Bzyb river, east of the Gagra range, where the valleys of the Lashipse and the Yupshara meet. Six rivers feed it and one, the Yupshara, drains it, flowing on into the Gega and then the Bzyb. The surrounding slopes belong to the Euxine-Colchic deciduous forests, with groves of evergreen boxwood and Nordmann firs that can grow taller than 70 metres; higher up the forest gives way to subalpine meadows. The lake holds trout, and a nature reserve was created around it as early as 1930. A much smaller lake, Little Ritsa, lies nearby.
Local legend explains the lake through a story of love and loss. A girl named Ritsa lived in the valley with her three brothers, Agepsta, Atsetuka and Pshegishkha, who hunted in the high mountains. Two forest robbers, Gega and Iupshara, heard her singing and carried her off; in the struggle that followed a sword thrown by one of the brothers dammed the valley, it filled with water, and Ritsa drowned. The robber Iupshara was flung out of the lake and swept away to the sea. In their grief, the story goes, the brothers turned into the mountains that still stand guard around the water, and the peaks and rivers here bear their names. A road from the Black Sea coast was built in 1936, and the lake became one of the best-known beauty spots of the Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin had a summer dacha on its shore, and Leonid Brezhnev later had one nearby. A viewpoint on the approach road, properly the Chabgar cornice, is popularly called "Goodbye, Motherland!", a name surrounded by several competing stories.
Getting there
The lake is reached by a mountain road from the Black Sea coast that follows the valleys of the Bzyb, the Gega and the Yupshara and continues beyond it to the Avadhara resort. The nearest airport in a straight line is Sochi International Airport (AER), about 48 km away on the other side of the Psou border crossing; Sukhumi Airport (SUI) is about 84 km away. The nearest railway station is Novy Afon, about 51 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Lake Ritsa is a lake in the north-western part of Abkhazia, in the Caucasus Mountains. It is surrounded by mixed mountain forests and subalpine meadows. The road from the Black Sea coast was built in 1936. The resort of Avadhara lies to the north of the lake. The lake was an important tourist attraction during the Soviet period. While the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russia-Georgian war destroyed much of the tourism industry in the country, the lake is still frequently visited by Russian tourists.
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