Solea Dam

Solea Dam is the youngest of the 21 dams tracked on Fragmata, completed in 2013 in the Solea valley on the northern side of the Troodos mountains in Cyprus. It impounds the Karkotis — remarkable as the island's only permanently flowing river, kept alive through the rainless summer by a porous gabbro aquifer that slowly feeds its bed. The dam itself is a 56-metre rockfill embankment: a mass of dumped and compacted rock whose interlocking fragments give it high strength and free drainage, sealed by a separate impervious element since the rock alone cannot hold water back. Its reservoir stores about 4.5 million cubic metres, making it the largest of the island's dedicated recharge dams.

Like its neighbours Tamassos and Klirou-Malounta, Solea was built not to fill taps but to replenish groundwater. The dams of this trio hold back winter runoff on the Troodos northern flank and release it gradually, letting it percolate into the aquifers that supply the wider Nicosia area. In Cyprus this is more than a technicality: open reservoirs lose close to two metres of water depth to evaporation each year, while water banked in an aquifer keeps, ready to be drawn from wells and boreholes when needed.

Sitting astride a river that never runs dry, Solea occupies an unusual niche in Cypriot hydrology — a modern dam whose main job is to pass water onward, underground.