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.
Ashopton and Derwent were two villages of the upper Derwent Valley in the Derbyshire Peak District, submerged in the mid-1940s by the creation of Ladybower Reservoir. The reservoir was the third and largest in a chain built to supply water to the growing industrial cities of South Yorkshire and the East Midlands, following the earlier Howden and Derwent dams upstream. Construction of Ladybower began in 1935, the buildings were demolished by autumn 1943, and the impounded waters had drowned both villages by the end of 1944.
Before the flooding, residents were relocated, buildings were demolished or stripped, and bodies from Derwent’s churchyard were exhumed and reinterred elsewhere. The most striking landmark of the doomed valley was the spire of Derwent’s church, deliberately left standing as a memorial, which continued to protrude above the waterline after the reservoir filled. It became a melancholy tourist curiosity until 15 December 1947, when it was dynamited because it was judged unsafe and a hazard to the public.
Ladybower and its sister reservoirs acquired a second, famous chapter: the upstream Derwent and Howden dams were used by the RAF’s 617 Squadron to rehearse the low-level ‘Dambusters’ bouncing-bomb runs ahead of Operation Chastise in 1943, and the valley remains tied to that wartime story. The combination of lost villages and aviation heritage has made the area one of the most visited corners of the Peak District.
Ashopton and Derwent are not gone for good — at least Derwent is not. In severe droughts the falling reservoir exposes Derwent’s stone foundations, garden walls, the old valley road and the footings of its packhorse bridge, drawing crowds who walk among the ruins. Dry summers such as 1976, 1995, 2018 and 2022 produced especially complete re-emergences. Ashopton’s remains, by contrast, lie buried under silt and are not expected to reappear.
St. Thomas was a Mormon farming town in the Moapa Valley of southern Nevada, founded in 1865 by pioneers led by Thomas S. Smith near the confluence of the Muddy and Virgin rivers with the Colorado. At its height it was home to roughly 500 people, with a school, hotel, shops, a garage and a soda fountain, sustained by irrigated desert agriculture. It was abandoned in 1938 as the rising waters of Lake Mead, impounded behind the newly completed Hoover Dam, slowly drowned the town.
The town’s history was bracketed by two displacements. The first came in 1871, when a boundary survey placed the settlement in Nevada rather than Arizona; when Nevada demanded several years of back taxes payable in gold, many settlers abandoned the site and moved to Utah. New Latter-day Saint settlers rebuilt St. Thomas in the 1880s, and it grew into a substantial valley town on the Arrowhead Trail auto route between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles before the federal dam project doomed it for good.
When Hoover Dam was completed and Lake Mead began to fill, the federal government bought out residents and the town was gradually inundated. The last holdout, Hugh Lord, is said to have rowed away from his home as the water reached it on 11 June 1938. For decades the town lay submerged beneath the reservoir, its location marked only on old maps.
Falling reservoir levels have since repeatedly resurrected St. Thomas. The ruins re-emerged in 1945 and 1963, and the sustained Colorado River drought of the 2000s and beyond — with notable exposures around 2002 and 2012 — has left much of the townsite walkable again. The National Park Service maintains an interpretive trail through the salt-crusted foundations within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, where the ruins now serve as a stark gauge of the river’s decline.
Capel Celyn was a small Welsh-speaking farming community in the Tryweryn valley northwest of Bala, in what was then Merionethshire and is now Gwynedd. Around 67 people lived in the valley itself, clustered along the River Tryweryn in twelve houses and farms, with a chapel and cemetery, a school and a post office at the heart of communal life. It was one of the last places in Wales where the population was effectively Welsh-only speaking, making it a stronghold of the language and a symbol of a self-contained rural Welsh culture.
In 1965 the valley was deliberately flooded to create Llyn Celyn, a reservoir built to supply Liverpool and the Wirral with water for industrial use. Liverpool City Council had secured the necessary powers through a private Act of Parliament — the Liverpool Corporation Act 1957 — a route that allowed the corporation to proceed without needing planning consent from any Welsh local authority. The inundation submerged every building in the village, displacing 48 of the 67 valley residents and erasing a living community in the name of an English city’s water security.
The drowning of Capel Celyn became one of the defining episodes of modern Welsh political history. The fact that 35 of Wales’s 36 Members of Parliament opposed the bill (the 36th abstaining) yet were unable to stop it laid bare how little weight Welsh democratic opinion carried at Westminster in the 1950s. The episode galvanised Plaid Cymru, fed a current of direct action that included bombing the construction site, and is widely cited as a catalyst in the long campaign that eventually led to Welsh devolution.
More than half a century later, Capel Celyn endures less as a place than as a slogan. The graffiti motto “Cofiwch Dryweryn” — “Remember Tryweryn” — painted on a ruined wall near Llanrhystud became a national rallying cry, and Liverpool City Council issued a formal apology in 2005. The reservoir still supplies water, but the valley beneath it remains a wound and a warning in Welsh memory.