Qualla: Cahora Bassa Dam

Cahora Bassa Dam: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Herbert Hönigsperger, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the dam closed, there were villages. Portuguese engineers, working under the colonial government that still held Mozambique in the late 1960s, built a company town on higher ground - housing for contractors, electricians, engineers. The town went up on top of native Mozambican homes. The people who had lived there were evicted and received no compensation for their lost property. Then, in December 1974, the reservoir began to fill. The Zambezi, which had flowed through this gorge for as long as there had been a Zambezi, met a wall of concrete 171 meters tall and 303 meters wide at the crest, and it stopped.

Read more: Cahora Bassa Dam on Qualla

Image: Herbert Hönigsperger | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cahora Bassa Dam: Concrete and Politics

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (WT-en) Nic at English Wikivoyage, Public domain. Construction began in 1969, a late and expensive project of Portuguese colonial administration in Mozambique. The design was ambitious: a double-curvature arch dam impounding 2,700 square kilometers of Zambezi water into a reservoir that would eventually reach 250 kilometers long...

Read more: Cahora Bassa Dam on Qualla

Image: (WT-en) Nic at English Wikivoyage | Public domain

Cahora Bassa Dam: A Dam in Wartime

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Herbert Hönigsperger, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dam filled in December 1974, months after the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon had swept the Portuguese colonial regime aside. Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975. The new country inherited a functioning dam and a peculiar ownership structure: eighteen percent to Moza...

Read more: Cahora Bassa Dam on Qualla

Image: Herbert Hönigsperger | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cahora Bassa Dam: Who Gets the Power

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Herbert Hönigsperger, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dam generates around 1,450 megawatts from its five turbines. Most of it still goes south. Locals in the Zambezi valley describe the irony bitterly: the river that was dammed on their land supplies electricity to other countries while many nearby villages still lack reliable p...

Read more: Cahora Bassa Dam on Qualla

Image: Herbert Hönigsperger | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cahora Bassa Dam: Refit for 2050

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EmjayE2 at English Wikipedia (Original text: Martha Evans, Cape Town), Public domain. In December 2022, Hidroelectrica de Cahora Bassa - the company now majority-owned by Mozambique - secured a 125-million-dollar loan to modernize the dam and its operating systems. The engineering contract went to a consortium pairing Sweco from Sweden with Intertechne Consultores...

Read more: Cahora Bassa Dam on Qualla

Image: EmjayE2 at English Wikipedia (Original text: Martha Evans, Cape Town) | Public domain