Agia Marina Dam

Agia Marina Dam is a small rockfill dam on the Xeros river in the Paphos district of Cyprus, near the village of Agia Marina Chrysochous on the western side of Chrysochou Bay. Completed in 1965, it dates from the first wave of dam building that followed Cypriot independence, when dozens of the island's seasonal streams were harnessed for agriculture.

With an embankment 33 metres high and a reservoir capacity of just 0.298 million cubic metres (MCM), Agia Marina is the smallest of the four reservoirs monitored in the Chrysochou region, and one of the smallest on the whole island. Its role is correspondingly local: capturing the brief winter flow of the Xeros so that nearby farms can irrigate their citrus groves and vegetable plots through the dry season, as part of the wider Chrysochou irrigation network anchored by the much larger Evretou reservoir.

A reservoir this small responds quickly to the weather, filling fast in wet winters and drawing down sharply in drought years. In the exceptionally rainy winter of 2025–2026 the dam reached capacity and overflowed in March 2026, one of a series of Paphos-district dams to spill that season. Modest as it is, Agia Marina remains a working piece of the rural water infrastructure that sustains farming along this quiet stretch of the Cypriot coast.