Qualla: Serra da Mesa Dam

Serra da Mesa Dam: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreamabrito, CC BY-SA 3.0. Brazil's single largest body of stored fresh water is nowhere near the Amazon. It lies in the cerrado of northern Goias, behind a wall of packed clay and rock 154 metres high, and from the air it does not read as a lake at all. It reads as a hand with far too many fingers, drowned valleys pushing out in every direction between low scrubby hills, the shoreline folding back on itself for hundreds of kilometres. The Serra da Mesa reservoir holds 54.4 billion cubic metres. No other reservoir in the country holds more, and yet by surface area it ranks only fifth. The gap between those two rankings is the whole point of this place. Serra da Mesa is not wide. It is deep.

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Image: Andreamabrito | CC BY-SA 3.0

Serra da Mesa Dam: The Machine Nobody Sees

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Claudio Weliton Rodrigues Lima, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk the crest of the dam and there is nothing mechanical to look at. Fifteen hundred metres of earth fill stretch away under your boots, roughly twelve million cubic metres of compacted material wrapped around a clay core, and the only hardware in sight is the spillway: five ste...

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Image: Claudio Weliton Rodrigues Lima | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra da Mesa Dam: A Battery Made of Water

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreamabrito, CC BY-SA 3.0. Eletrobras Furnas began studying the upper Tocantins in 1981, looking for places to put two large dams. Serra da Mesa, then called Sao Felix, had the geology the engineers wanted, and construction started in 1986. On 24 October 1996 the gates closed and the river began backing up...

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Image: Andreamabrito | CC BY-SA 3.0

Serra da Mesa Dam: What Went Under

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Claudio Weliton Rodrigues Lima, CC BY-SA 4.0. Filling a reservoir 1,784 square kilometres across is not a quick operation, and for most of two years the water simply kept climbing. Farms, riverside settlements and rural districts near Niquelandia went under a metre at a time. Thousands of people had to move. Some of them wer...

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Image: Claudio Weliton Rodrigues Lima | CC BY-SA 4.0

Serra da Mesa Dam: Minacu, Above the Waterline

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Claudio Weliton Rodrigues Lima, CC BY-SA 4.0. The nearest town has spent its whole modern life attached to whatever is being extracted nearby. Minacu, home to fewer than thirty thousand people, sits above the Cana Brava reservoir a short way downstream and takes its name and its payroll from the Cana Brava mine, one of the l...

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Image: Claudio Weliton Rodrigues Lima | CC BY-SA 4.0