Sulak Canyon
Interesting facts
- At about 1,920 m the canyon is often said to be deeper than Arizona's Grand Canyon, by some 60 metres.
- The Sulak is formed where the Avar Koysu and Andi Koysu rivers meet, then runs about 169 km to the Caspian Sea.
- Until the 20th century only the river's lowest reach near its mouth was called the Sulak; in the Dargin language its name means 'rapids'.
- In 1967 builders of the Chirkey Dam blocked the river with a single directed explosion of 37 tonnes of explosives that brought down more than 65,000 cubic metres of rock.
- Three months after work began in 1963, a rockfall dammed the gorge; the water rose 22 metres in five hours before bursting through.
- The magnitude 6.6 Dagestan earthquake of 1970 struck while the dam was being built, setting off landslides of up to about ten million cubic metres upstream.
- To avoid cutting deep into the unstable gorge walls, the power station's turbines were placed in two rows, a layout used nowhere else in Russia.
- Concrete for the dam was lowered from above by three cable cranes spanning 500 metres, using radio-controlled buckets.
- Early designs for a dam here in the 1930s were reviewed by foreign experts including Karl Terzaghi, the founder of soil mechanics.
- The river carries more than 20 million tonnes of sediment a year past the dam site, much of it from melting snow and glaciers.
Why it is worth it
The Sulak River cuts through the mountains of central Dagestan in a canyon about 53 km long and as much as 1,920 metres deep, one of the deepest in Europe. In places the walls drop almost vertically for hundreds of metres to the river, which in long stretches is held back by dams and fills the floor of the gorge from wall to wall. The canyon lies in the North Caucasus of Russia, roughly 100 km by road from Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, and has become one of the republic's best-known natural sights.
Erosion here has exposed a long sequence of rock layers: deposits from the Jurassic, Cretaceous and Tertiary periods come to the surface along the walls, and fossils occur in each of them. The river has also been harnessed for power. Within the canyon system stands the Chirkey Dam, a concrete arch 232.5 m high and 338 m long, built between 1964 and the late 1970s and the tallest arch dam in Russia; its reservoir stretches for about 40 km behind it, and the turbines of its 1,000-megawatt power station sit at the foot of the wall.
The cliffs support the largest breeding colonies in Russia of rare vultures listed in the national Red Data Book, including griffon vultures, cinereous (black) vultures and Egyptian vultures. Rare and endemic plants such as a horned sainfoin survive on the slopes. Visitor numbers have grown quickly: in the first nine months of 2019 about 320,000 people came, almost one and a half times as many as a year earlier.
Getting there
The canyon lies near the settlement of Dubki in Dagestan. The nearest town is Kizilyurt, about 22 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Makhachkala Uytash International Airport (MCX), about 70 km away; the road route from Makhachkala is around 100 km.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Sulak Canyon is a steep-sided deepest canyon in Europe carved by the Sulak River in Dagestan, Russia. The Sulak Canyon is 53 kilometres (33 mi) long, and attains a depth of over a mile. It is 63 meters deeper than the Grand Canyon in the US and 620 meters deeper than the Tara River Canyon in Balkans. It is a tourist attraction in Dagestan.
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