El Atazar Dam
arch dam built near Madrid, Spain on the Lozoya River
El Atazar Dam is an arch dam built near Madrid, Spain on the Lozoya River, very close to where the Lozoya joins the Jarama. The curved design of the dam is optimum for the narrow gorge in which it was built to retain water in the reservoir. Arch dams are thin and require less material to construct than other dam types.
When the dam was built, the decision was made to use the dam to store and regulate water only and not to provide energy. Construction started on the dam in 1968 and finished in 1972.
Design
The dam is 134 m (440 ft) high and 52.3 m (171.6 ft) wide at the foundation. The reservoir capacity is 424,000,000 m3 (344,000 acre feet). It is a double curvature concrete arch buttress design.
Problems
Monitoring of the dam revealed abnormal movement. Although dams normally move, the left side of the El Atazar Dam was moving more than the right because a support built on the dam's right made that side less flexible.
The public source identifies “El Atazar Dam” as arch dam built near Madrid, Spain on the Lozoya River. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Atazar, arch and built.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q43400029. Authority coordinates are 40.912, -3.473. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “El Atazar Dam” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.