Ricobayo is a locality in the

province of Zamora Zamora () is a province of western Spain, in the western part of the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is bordered by the provinces of Ourense, León, Valladolid, and Salamanca, and by Portugal. The present-day province of Zamora w ...

, Spain. Formerly a municipality in its own right, it is part of Muelas del Pan.

Bridge

Long important as a crossing-point on the

River Esla The Esla is a river in the provinces of León and Zamora in the northwest of Spain. It is a tributary of the Duero River that starts in the Cantabrian Mountains and is long. Its direction of flow is from north to south. It is the largest tribut ...

, Ricobayo's original bridge is now under water, having been drowned by the construction of the Ricobayo reservoir. Since the 1990s the main bridge has been the

Ricobayo Arch Bridge The Ricobayo Arch Bridge (Spanish: ''Puente de San Esteban'' or ''Arco de Ricobayo'') is a supported deck arch bridge that carries the National 122 Road over the Esla River at Ricobayo in the province of Zamora, Spain. The original bridge at Ri ...

Dam and reservoir

In the 1920s it was agreed to build a

gravity dam A gravity dam is a dam constructed from concrete or stone masonry and designed to hold back water by using only the weight of the material and its resistance against the foundation to oppose the horizontal pressure of water pushing against it. ...

on the

at Ricobayo. It impounds the Ricobayo Reservoir. The dam is part of a hydroelectric scheme known as Saltos del Duero. This scheme involves other dams in the catchment area of the

Duero The Douro (, , ; es, Duero ; la, Durius) is the highest-flow river of the Iberian Peninsula. It rises near Duruelo de la Sierra in Soria Province, central Spain, meanders south briefly then flows generally west through the north-west part of ...

such as the

Almendra Dam The Almendra Dam, also known as Villarino Dam, in Salamanca, Spain, interrupts the course of the River Tormes five kilometres from the village from which it takes its name: Almendra (literally, almond). It was constructed between 1963 and 1970. ...

. As well as electricity generation, Ricobayo Reservoir is used for recreation. In the summer of 2021 the two uses came into conflict, when the reservoir was largely drained by the electric utility company

Iberdrola Iberdrola () is a Spanish multinational electric utility company based in Bilbao, Spain. Iberdrola has a workforce of around 34,000 employees serving around 31.67 million customers. Subsidiaries include Scottish Power (United Kingdom) ...

, making Ricobayo less attractive to tourists.

References

Populated places in the Province of Zamora {{Zamora-geo-stub