Santomera Reservoir

Whilst I have visited my parents many times over the last 9 years in Spain and I have visited one or two of the nearby towns, one thing I have always seen and been intrigued by, is a nearby reservoir that I have passed by from a distance many times.

This time when I was over there I was determined to actually visit the reservoir and the area around it.  The area near to the Santomera Reservoir is a huge Pine forest that is bisected by the main road from Fortuna to the Autoroute that can take you to Alicante airport and to Murcia.  It was formed by the building of the Santomera Dam in the 1950′s as a defence against flooding of the Segura area by the Santomera and Abanilla rivers and has a surface area of 263.4 hectares.  The area around the reservoir is beautiful and has some amazing landscape views, so much so that a ‘Cass Del Agua’ (Water house) was built for Franco here as a retreat, but he never visited, probably due to the area’s strong royalist sympathies.

We went to visit the reservoir and Dam on a warm Palm Sunday and we decided to drive out there to explore the area, Lou and my Mum came with me and we followed the signs from the main road that bisects the forest towards the Casa Del Agua.  We went past this area and as it was such a nice day there were hundreds of families in a nearby picnic area, we carried on past this area and up the hill to the side of the Dam.  When we got up to the same level of the Dam we found you could drive along the top of the Dam to a parking area in the middle of the two sections of Dam, we had a wander around the top and saw you could walk around one side of the Dam and decided to come back another day with the dogs.  A few days later Lou and I took the dogs for their first real ‘walk’ that didn’t involve them just running around the land my Mum’s house is on, or when had got out of the garden and took themselves for a walk in the local area.  We had bought them extending leads and after a little hesitation they seem to like this arrangement, and I got to take a load of photos of the area, take a look and see what you think, feel free to leave comments.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 4:53 pm. It is filed under Blog, Life, Photography and tagged with Dam, Dog, Family, Forest, Lou, Murcia, Pine, reservoir, Santomera, Santomera Reservoir, Water. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.