About Solina Dam

The Solina reservoir in southeastern Poland's Bieszczady foothills is the country's largest by volume, holding 472 million cubic metres of water when full. Completed in 1968, the 82-metre concrete buttress dam spans the San river valley near the village of Solina in Podkarpackie province. The project required the resettlement of around 6,000 people from seventeen villages that were submerged as the reservoir filled. Today Solina is the centrepiece of a pumped-storage hydroelectric complex that provides critical peak-load capacity for the Polish national grid, with turbines capable of generating up to 200 megawatts. The reservoir extends for 27 kilometres upstream along the San valley and up the Solinka tributary, with maximum depths exceeding 60 metres. The surrounding Bieszczady mountains — part of the Outer Eastern Carpathians — are one of the most pristine wilderness areas in Central Europe, home to wolf, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, and European bison reintroduced from Białowieża. The Solina reservoir and the adjacent Bieszczady National Park together form a major ecotourism and recreation destination, with sailing, powerboat racing, and lakeside resorts at Polańczyk and Wołkowyja. Water quality is generally good due to the sparsely populated and largely forested catchment, though phosphorus inputs from agricultural land near the headwaters require ongoing monitoring.