Klirou-Malounta Dam

Klirou-Malounta Dam is a small aquifer-recharge dam in central Cyprus, impounding the Akaki river on the northern foothills of the Troodos mountains. Completed in 2007, it is a 38-metre earthfill embankment — a zoned pile of compacted soil built around a low-permeability clay core — with a capacity of 2 million cubic metres. The dam takes its double-barrelled name from the two villages it sits between, Klirou and Malounta, in the hill country southwest of Nicosia.

Its purpose is not to supply drinking water directly but to recharge the aquifer of the Akaki valley. Together with the Tamassos and Solea dams, it forms a trio of recharge structures built this century on the Troodos northern flank to replenish the groundwater bodies that serve the wider Nicosia area. The logic is simple and well suited to Cyprus: winter storm runoff that would otherwise race down the riverbed and be lost is held back and released slowly, giving it time to percolate into the alluvial gravels below. Water banked underground is safe from evaporation — no small advantage on an island that loses nearly two metres of open-water depth to the sky every year — and communities then draw it back through wells and boreholes when they need it.

Modest in size even by Cypriot standards, Klirou-Malounta is one of the youngest dams tracked on Fragmata, and one of the quietest: its work happens largely out of sight, in the water table beneath the valley.