Lake Nasser

Lake Nasser

Lake Nasser is an artificial lake that was named in honour of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the mastermind of the High Dam project which resulted in the Aswan High Dam being built between 1958 and 1970.  The lake spans around 565 kilometres in Egypt and Sudan and it contains about 170,000 kilometres cubes of water.  When the dam was impounded in 1970, the lake was formed.  Even though parts of the lake are in Sudan, it is mostly centered around the interests of the Egyptian people.  The lake is used today to produce hydroelectricity, irrigation for the fields, and for fishing.  The lake also helps regulate the waters of the Nile that is beneath the Aswan Dam, and it has eliminated the seasonal floods that usually took over the river.  Since the dam was put into place, 3,300 kilometres square of new land has been irrigated.

When Lake Nasser was finished, it covered a large area of the Nubian territory of Sudan and it caused the United Nations to step in to relocate numerous historical sites.  18 ancient temples in the area, including Abu Simbel, were saved between 1964 and 1968.  Wadi Halfa, a Sudanese river-port and railway terminal, was one of the towns that was submerged by the lake and subsequently relocated and rebuilt nearby.  The entire Egyptian Nubian community – approximately several hundred thousand people – was also forced to relocate from the area of the upper Nile.

During the 1990s Lake Nasser saw a rise in the lakes water level.  The Egyptians referred to it as a ‘spilling over of waters’, and the water reached the western edge of the Sahara Desert to form the Toshka lakes.  It took eight years for the lakes to form and many people believe to this day that the waters were deliberately leaked from the river and Lake Nasser.  Today ferries transport visitors from Aswan in Egypt to the new location of Wadi Halfa where they can board the trains to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.  This is the only way to cross into Sudan from Egypt unless one flies between the two countries as it is prohibited by the governments of the two countries to cross the borders by land.  There are no paved roads between Sudan and Egypt, and the ferries are part of a link in the Cairo-Cape Town Highway that stretches the continent of Africa.