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Lake Sanabria

Galende, Sanabria, Zamora

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 2 Nature · 1 Activities · 1 Curiosities · 2 Historical milestones

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Lake Sanabria

Nature · Galende, Sanabria, Zamora

Image of Galende, not of the place itself.

The lago de Sanabria, carved out by the Tera glacier during the Würm glaciation, is the largest lake of glacial origin on the Iberian Peninsula, covering 318.7 hectares with a maximum depth of 53 metres, at around 997 metres above sea level. It formed more than ten thousand years ago, when a plateau glacier covered the mountains and tongues of ice descended from it through the valleys; as it retreated it exposed glacial cirques, moraines and more than twenty small lakes scattered across the range. The surrounding area has been protected since 1946 as a Sitio Natural de Interés Nacional (a national natural-heritage protection designation) and was declared a nature reserve in 1978; expanded in 2017, the Lago de Sanabria y Sierras Segundera y de Porto nature reserve today covers 32,302 hectares across Galende, Cobreros, Trefacio and Porto.

Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Porlapaz assumed (based on copyright claims). (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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