Lakes

Świnna Poręba Reservoir

Between Wadowice and the hills of the Little Beskids, the Skawa river has been dammed by a gigantic concrete wall. The Świnna Poręba Reservoir, increasingly often called Lake Mucharskie, is one of the youngest large dam reservoirs in Poland — and one of the longest in the making.

Three decades of construction

The first designs were drawn as early as the 1950s, but construction only began in 1986. The price of the investment was the village of Świnna Poręba, whose inhabitants were resettled, and the dismantled Wadowice–Skawce railway line. Water started to be let into the basin in 2017, though two years later the level was still lower than planned and work continued. There was also another idea for the name — the basin was to be called the Wadowice Lake.

The dam in numbers

The concrete dam is up to 54 m high and 604 m long, and the reservoir can hold 161 million m³ of water and spread over 1,035 ha. The facility’s main role is flood protection and retention — and it proved itself during the 2010 flood: thanks to it, the flood wave on the Vistula in Kraków was about 0.5 m lower, and the water did not overflow the Dębnicki Bridge.

By the water

The shores are gradually gaining recreational infrastructure — the development of leisure areas for the region has been announced here. National road 28 provides access (address: ul. Droga Krajowa 28), and the reservoir lies only a few kilometres from Wadowice, so a visit naturally combines with a stroll around the town of John Paul II and a loop through the Little Beskids.