Qualla: Furnas Dam

Furnas Dam: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luiz coelho, CC BY-SA 3.0. Minas Gerais has no coastline. In 1963 it got a sea anyway. When the Furnas Dam closed on the Grande River, water began climbing through the valleys of western Minas far faster than the engineers had scheduled — a reservoir expected to take two years filled in roughly nine months. What emerged was 1,473 square kilometres of open water touching thirty-four municipalities, holding some seven times the volume of Guanabara Bay. Mineiros, landlocked and not given to modesty, called it the Mar de Minas. The Sea of Minas.

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Image: Luiz coelho | CC BY-SA 3.0

Furnas Dam: The First Big One

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luiz coelho, CC BY-SA 3.0. Construction began in 1957, and Furnas was the first large dam Brazil ever built — the project that taught the country's power sector what a project of this scale actually involves. The contractor was Wimpey Construction, a British firm, and the work went up in the canyon of the ...

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Image: Luiz coelho | CC BY-SA 3.0

Furnas Dam: Nine Months of Rising Water

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mateus S. Figueiredo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Filling a reservoir on paper and filling one in the field are different exercises. The water reached the lower streets of Guapé in January 1963 and kept coming. The company rebuilt the town on higher ground with new infrastructure, and did the same for the village of Barra Velha ...

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Image: Mateus S. Figueiredo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Furnas Dam: What the Turbines Are For

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Margarida61, CC BY-SA 3.0. Eight Francis turbines of 152 megawatts each give Furnas an installed capacity of 1,216 megawatts, which was a very large number in 1963 and remains a serious one now. But generation is only half the job. The reservoir's other purpose is regulation: holding back the summer floods...

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Image: Margarida61 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Furnas Dam: The Sea Learns to Be a Destination

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MESSIASHAKME, CC BY-SA 3.0. Half a century on, the lake's economy is as much about weekends as watts. The drowned gorges near Capitólio turned out to be spectacular — sheer sandstone corridors barely wide enough for two boats, with waterfalls dropping straight into deep green water — and speedboat tours, di...

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Image: MESSIASHAKME | CC BY-SA 3.0