I’m going through a very busy period at work having just come back from World Travel Market Africa in Cape Town and off to Durban for Indaba in a couple of days. Because of it I’m running low on photos and rather than skipping days I decided to keep the daily photo concept going and recycle some pictures from The Firefly Photo Files over to PE Daily Photo. So lets go on a little PE Daily Photo holiday and discover the nearby Gamtoos River Valley, an area ideal for a weekend Sho’t Left out of the city. The “holiday” will be made up of a series of seven posts showing off some of the sights and attractions in the valley.
The Kouga Dam is one of the most important features in the Gamtoos Valley. It not just supplies water to irrigate the farms in the valley, it’s also one of Port Elizabeth’s main water supply dams. The dam is a double curve arch dam with an 82 m high wall and storage capacity of 128,7 million m3. The catchment area is inside the Baviaanskloof Wilderness Area from where the Kouga River carries the water into the 34 km long dam basin. Other than for water supply the dam was also built as a flood control mechanism to lessen the impact of a flood on the lower Gamtoos River. Visitors can get right up to the point where I took the photo from for a view of the dam.