On thursday 31.12.2015, in the last day of 2015, we did something nice with my wife. We took a bus to the Contra Dam. Contra Dam (also known as the Verzasca Dam or the Locarno Dam) is an arch dam on the Verzasca River in the Val Verzasca of Ticino, Switzerland. Contra Dam was constructed between 1961 and 1965, the height of the dam is 220 meters and it's the fourth tallest dam in Switzerland. I wanted to visit especially this dam because of the 20 years old movie. The dam became popular after "James Bond" jumped off it in the opening scene of the film GoldenEye in 1995.
Tourist season is over, so we were alone most of the time, which was nice. Weather was quite misty and temperature about +5 degrees.
It is huge.. From the distance, you can't imagine the size of it, and pictures can't tell you much. But when you are on the top of it and you look down, you'll notice the size. I was amazed. And this dam is barely in top 50 world wide, if you compare the heights of the dams.
That is (about) the view James Bond (British stuntman Wayne Michaels) saw, when he jumped off, 20 years ago.
You can also experience that view if you want. A company called Trekking Outdoor Team is doing Bungy Jumps in Contra Dam. Prices between 195-255 CHF. Now they are in the winter break till the end of march 2016, but you can do online bookings already.
The dam supports a 105 MW Verzasca Hydroelectric Power Station and generates an average of 234 GWh annually.
And because we didn't want to wait almost two hours for the next bus, we walked back down. It took only about one hour to walk, and it was nice way to burn some Christmas calories too. Well it didn't actually help much, because we went straight to a restaurant in Locarno to eat some Asian food :-)
After all it was a nice day and a great place to visit.
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