AT A GLANCE

Why go?

Zernek Dam (Zernek Barajı) is a high embankment dam and its long, glacial-green reservoir tucked into the mountains of Gürpınar district in eastern Turkey's Van Province. Built between 1980 and 1988 on the Hoşap Çayı stream, it stores water for irrigation and runs a hydroelectric plant, but for a traveller passing along the old Van–Hakkâri route it reads first as a striking piece of landscape engineering: an 80-metre wall of rock and earth holding back a 5-square-kilometre mountain lake in one of Turkey's most remote and scenic corners.↗↗↗

The reservoir—Lake Zernek—collects up to about 104 million cubic metres of water, enough to irrigate some 11,300 hectares of fields across the surrounding valleys, where barley, wheat and silage maize are the staple crops. That blend of raw mountain scenery and a working water system that sustains dozens of villages is what gives the site its quiet, off-the-beaten-track appeal.↗↗