Curdi, India: The Goan Village That Resurfaces Every May

Curdi (also spelled Kurdi) was a fertile, religiously mixed village in Sanguem taluka of South Goa, nestled in the foothills near the Western Ghats and watered by the Salaulim River. By the standards of the region it was prosperous and crowded — home to roughly 3,000 people across some 600 families who farmed paddy and cashew, tapped coconut and lived alongside one another as Hindus, Catholics and Muslims around a shared temple, chapel and shrine. In the mid-1980s it became the first community submerged by the reservoir of the Salaulim Dam, a project built to supply irrigation and drinking water to much of Goa.

The village disappeared beneath the rising reservoir as its roughly 600 families were resettled in the nearby villages of Valkinim and Vaddem, scattering a tight-knit, multi-faith community across the district. Its principal Hindu shrine, the Someshwar Temple, was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt on higher ground near the dam to spare it from the water. What might have been an ordinary story of dam-displacement then took an unusual turn dictated by the reservoir’s own rhythm — each year before the monsoon, when the dam draws down to its lowest level, the water recedes far enough to lay bare the bones of Curdi once more.

Every April and May the cracked, ochre lakebed gives the village back — house foundations and thresholds, old wells, and surviving structures including a hillside chapel and the remains of other temples emerge into the sun. Former residents and their descendants make an annual pilgrimage home, returning across the dry reservoir floor to clean ancestral sites, picnic among the ruins, hold the chapel feast and celebrate the festival of the relocated Someshwar Temple, turning a loss into a recurring act of remembrance and reunion.

Curdi has thus become one of the most poignant of the world’s drowned villages — not a place mourned only in the past tense, but one that reassembles itself every year for a community that refuses to let it vanish. The annual homecoming has drawn growing attention as a moving example of how displaced people keep a destroyed place alive through ritual, even after the dam and reservoir have done their work.

Adaminaby, Australia: The Town Moved for the Snowy Scheme

Old Adaminaby was a high-country town on the Monaro tablelands of New South Wales, settled in the gold-and-grazing era from the 1830s and serving the surrounding pastoral district for more than a century. In the 1950s it stood directly in the path of Lake Eucumbene, the central storage reservoir of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme — one of the largest engineering projects in Australian history. As the Eucumbene Dam rose, the town was condemned, and rather than simply abandoning it, authorities undertook one of the country’s most ambitious town relocations.

In a 1954 referendum residents chose a new site, and from 1956 the population of around 700 to 800 was resettled while roughly 100 houses and two churches were jacked up, loaded onto trucks and hauled some 9 kilometres to a new townsite that kept the name Adaminaby. Moving a single house could take six days to travel barely 10 kilometres. The original town was then submerged beneath the rising waters in 1957. The move preserved many individual structures but scattered the community across a new layout, severing the link between buildings, streets and the river flats that had given the old town its character.

Unlike many drowned settlements, Old Adaminaby was never permanently lost from view. Lake Eucumbene is a deep working storage that fluctuates dramatically with rainfall and the demands of the hydro scheme, and in dry years the lake retreats far enough to expose the bones of the old town. The severe drought of the mid-2000s, peaking in July 2007 when the lake fell to about 8.7 percent of capacity — its lowest level since filling — laid bare foundations, fences, road alignments, tree stumps, fire hydrants and the footprints of the school and houses.

The re-emergence turned the lost town into a periodic attraction and a focus of heritage interest, with former residents and descendants walking streets they had not seen in fifty years. The influx of sightseers also brought souvenir-hunting, prompting a conservation order over the site in 2007. New Adaminaby, with its relocated churches and houses, remains a living settlement, making this a rare case of a community physically carried away from its drowning rather than merely dispersed by it.