Guide
The Kirazdere dam stands on the Kirazdere stream in Kocaeli and was built between 1987 and 1999 to produce drinking water. Because it lies in the town of Yuvacık it was formerly called the Yuvacık dam.
It is a rockfill dam with an embankment volume of 5,200,000 cubic metres, standing 109 metres above the stream bed. At normal water level the reservoir holds 60 cubic hectometres and covers 1.74 square kilometres, and the dam supplies 142 cubic hectometres of drinking water a year — about eighty per cent of the water needed by the province of Kocaeli.
The reservoir dried up in the summer of 2006, but after work was carried out it met the needs of the whole population of Kocaeli in the summer of 2007; in that year, when many provinces in Türkiye suffered water shortage, the measures taken meant that this dam covered the province's requirement in full.
The dam has no hydroelectric plant and supplies the city only with drinking water. Away from the reservoir there are trout farms, picnic grounds and other recreation areas.