Qualla: Tucuruí Dam

Tucuruí Dam: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bruno Huberman, Repórter do Futuro, CC BY 2.0. The name comes from the Tupi language and means grasshopper's water. What stands there now is a wall of concrete 78 metres high and nearly seven kilometres long, holding back the Tocantins River in the eastern Amazon. Tucuruí was the first large-scale hydroelectric project ever built in the Brazilian rainforest, a test case for the idea that the Amazon could be turned into a battery. It works: 25 turbines, 8,370 megawatts, power for some 13 million people. The question the dam has never stopped raising is who paid for it, and in what currency.

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Image: Bruno Huberman, Repórter do Futuro | CC BY 2.0

Tucuruí Dam: Drawing Lines on the Tocantins

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Reconnaissance of the river began in 1964, carried out by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and USAID. Brazilian studies followed through the late 1960s, and by 1973 the military government of President Emílio Médici was being asked to fund a dam on the Tocantins. Two sites were on ...

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Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tucuruí Dam: What the Water Covered

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (WT-en) Mimi at English Wikivoyage, Public domain. Filling the reservoir meant emptying the valley. Between 25,000 and 35,000 people were removed from the future flood zone in the early 1980s. Around 14,000 were relocated by the government, and roughly 3,750 of those ended up on islands the rising water had just created — new lan...

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Image: (WT-en) Mimi at English Wikivoyage | Public domain

Tucuruí Dam: The River After the Dam

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vanilton2006, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Tocantins had held some 280 species of fish. Around 178 remain. Manatees and river dolphins, the pink Amazon boto among them, once moved freely along this stretch; they now face spillways and turbines nothing in their evolution prepared them for. Behind the wall, nutrient-loa...

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Image: Vanilton2006 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tucuruí Dam: Dilma Ferreira Silva

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Celso Abreu from Belém, Brasil, CC BY 2.0. Opposition to Tucuruí has been continuous since the project was announced, and it has been organised largely by the people the reservoir moved. In 2007 members of the Movement of People Affected by Dams, the Landless Workers' Movement and Via Campesina occupied the plant for two ...

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Image: Celso Abreu from Belém, Brasil | CC BY 2.0

Tucuruí Dam: Concrete, Measured

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Celso Abreu from Belém, Brasil, CC BY 2.0. The engineering is genuinely enormous. The main concrete gravity structure runs 6.9 kilometres; add the Mojú and Caraipé earth-fill dikes and the barrier stretches 12,515 metres across the valley. Its Creager-type service spillway, controlled by 20 floodgates, can pass 110,000 cu...

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Image: Celso Abreu from Belém, Brasil | CC BY 2.0