Stausee Margaritze

The Stausee Margaritze lies in the High Tauern range of Carinthia, high above the valley floor at 2 000 metres. It is a man-made reservoir built to store meltwater from the Pasterze glacier and the Leiterbach stream. Two dams, the Möllsperre and the Margaritzensperre, hold back up to 3.2 million cubic metres of water for the Kaprun hydro-electric scheme. The lake is fed by the shrinking Pasterze, which once reached farther down the valley. In the 1970s its snout still touched the Pasterzengrund above the Margaritze, creating the Sandersee. By the 1990s that lake had vanished under sediment, and today about 40 000 cubic metres of silt settle in the reservoir every year. Engineers keep the intake clear with a suction dredger while plans for a sand trap at Naßfeld move forward. Visitors arrive along the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, turning off at the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe spur. The reservoir stretches roughly 200 metres long and 800 metres wide, its dark waters reflecting the surrounding peaks. The dam walls rise thirty-nine and fifty-six metres above the valley floor, and the water level swings between 1 980 and 2 036 metres. From the shore there are views across the reservoir to the glacier’s present snout two kilometres upstream.