Lake with rose water. pink lakes

Be sure to take a look at pink lake, also known as Retba. The color of the water in it resembles either potassium permanganate or a strawberry cocktail. This incredible natural formation features natural water.

It is not surprising that the lake is considered one of the main ones. What is its secret?

The Rose Water Mystery

The water of Lake Retba is very salty. For most microorganisms, the salt content is lethal, and only one species can survive in it. It is these creatures that give the water its beautiful color. The intensity of the shade can vary from delicate pinkish to dark brown, everything is determined by the angle of incidence of the sun's rays and weather conditions. For example, during the dry season, Pink Lake in Senegal becomes incredibly bright, attracting especially a large number of tourists. The magical hue of the water, combined with the many boats gliding along the surface of the lake, creates a completely surreal picture.

Where is it located?

You can look at Pink Lake off the coast of the Atlantic. It is located near Dakar, the capital of the country.

Only thirty kilometers from the city, and you are there. From herself western point The peninsula is also not far away here - twenty kilometers to the Cape Zeleny peninsula. The area of ​​the amazing reservoir is small (three square kilometers), and its deepest place is three meters. There is a village on the shore, the workers and merchants of which are fed by the Pink Lake. Photos of this place often illustrate labor local residents. They stand up to their necks in water and manually scoop salt from the bottom. It's a very hard job, but it pays well. Therefore, flat boats daily cover the entire coastline.

History of Retba

Once there was a lagoon connected to the Atlantic Ocean. The surf brought sand from year to year, and the channel was gradually covered with it. In the 70s, a drought hit these places, after which Retba became shallow, making salt production quite affordable.

The water is gradually returning, and the workers stand in it up to their shoulders, but only twenty years ago the level here was at most waist-deep. The depth of the lake is also increasing because people extract about twenty-five thousand tons of salt, gradually scooping out the bottom. In addition to microorganisms called Dunaliella, which give the water a special shade with their pigment, no other organisms, no fish, no plants live here. The pink lake is even more deadly for all living things than the famous Dead Sea - there is one and a half times more salt here. It is impossible to drown here: dense water keeps objects on the surface. Even boats heavily laden with prey do not sink. It takes three hours of hard work to fill a boat, and each worker must repeat this operation three times a day. To prevent salt of such a concentration from corroding the skin, workers rub themselves with a special oil from the fruits of the tallow tree. Otherwise, painful ulcers will appear on the skin in half an hour. So it is better to watch the lake from the side.

Why is the water pink?

This question comes to mind in the first place, it is asked by almost every traveler who has visited this anomalous place. But the answer has not yet been found. Unlike other colored lakes in the world, such as Retba in Senegal and the salt waters in San Francisco Bay, the origin of Lake Hillier's pink color has not been unequivocally proven.

At first it was believed that the color was the result of paint created by organisms Dunaliella and Halobacteria that live in salt water. Another hypothesis says that the pink color is due to red halophilic bacteria. It was assumed that the reason for the pink color of the water is a combination of a certain salinity of the water and specific microorganisms. But tests conducted in 1950 did not confirm these assumptions. In subsequent years, a number of studies were also carried out, but the mystery of Lake Hiller remained unsolved, seriously disturbing the minds of scientists.

Lake location

Lake Hillier is located on the very edge of the Middle Island, it is separated from the ocean only by a small strip of eucalyptus trees surrounding the reservoir from all sides. The evergreen trees provide a great contrast to the landscape, especially against the backdrop of the pink lake.

As for the size of the lake, it cannot be said that it is large. Its width is about 600 meters. Due to its oval shape, the lake is often compared to a fabulous cake with delicious pink icing.

History of Pink Lake

The first mention of Lake Hillier dates back to 1802. British navigator and hydrographer Matthew Flinders stopped on Sredny Island and noticed unusual lake on the way to Sydney.

In the years 1820-1840, sealers and whalers stopped on the island, and at the beginning of the 20th century they began to extract salt from rose water. But the resource quickly dried up, and after 6 years, salt mining was stopped. Since then, the lake has not been used for industrial purposes.

Legend of Lake Hillier

This mysterious place have their own, very beautiful legend explaining the pink color of water. It is known to a few sailors and rare travelers.

In the 17th century, in the waters surrounding the island, the ship fell into a severe storm and sank. The only surviving sailor was thrown onto uninhabited lands. The fight against the elements severely wounded him. Because of the broken limbs, every movement brought pain to the sailor, and the extraction of food became torture. A few weeks later, mad with pain, loneliness and hopelessness, he exclaimed: “I will sell my soul to the devil if this nightmare stops!” Then a man came out from the shade of a nearby tree with two jugs in his hands: one was blood, and the other was milk. He walked slowly to the island's small inland lake and said, “The blood will help you forget what pain is. Milk will relieve you of hunger. All you have to do is take a dip in these waters.” After that, the stranger poured the contents of the jars into the lake, which caused it to change color. The sailor, who thought he had lost his mind, slowly entered the suspicious pink water and dived, and when he surfaced, the strange stranger was nowhere to be found. To the surprise of the traveler, there was no trace of fractures and hunger. Later, pirates landed on this island and captured a poor sailor. In the future, the filibusters were alerted by the fact that the prisoner did not feel pain and did not need food. Considering this a bad sign, superstitious pirates threw the sailor overboard, not believing in his mystical story healing. By the way, the original name of the lake “Hiller” is absolutely consonant in pronunciation English word"Healer", which translates as "Healer".

December 27th, 2014

If you try to search the Internet for information or, moreover, photos about Lake Retba Lake in Senegal, and then you want to see a photo of Lake Hillier in Australia, you will be surprised to find that half of the material about these lakes simply intersect. That is, they write about one lake, and photographs of another and vice versa. There you are one of the examples. This is not surprising since both of these lakes are PINK.

Let's try to sort information and photos on these lakes so that they are not confused in the future.

Let's start with a lake in Senegal.

Lake Retba

In the language of the Wolof people, the main ethnic group of Senegal, the lake is called Retba. A water mirror with an area of ​​three square kilometers is located near the Cape Verde peninsula. And this reservoir looks like in a fairy tale about a milky river with jelly banks, only here it’s the other way around: the water is pink, like cranberry jelly, but the shores are white, like milk, or, more precisely, like salt. But let's start, as they say, from the very beginning.

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Many years ago, the lake was a lagoon connected to the Atlantic Ocean by a narrow channel. Gradually ocean waves sand was washed up, which blocked the channel, and the lagoon turned into a salt lake, at first quite deep. However, in the 1970s, droughts began in Senegal, and the lake became very shallow. Now its greatest depth does not exceed three meters.
The water in Retba is really bright pink, and the reason for the unique color is that cyanobacteria live in the lake - the oldest microorganisms that appeared in the Earth's biosphere 3.5 billion years ago. But admiration is not only their respectable age. These bacteria are one of the few that can survive in the thick brine that is the water of Pink Lake. The salt concentration here is 380 grams per liter, that is, almost one and a half times higher than in the Dead Sea. Salt lies in a thick layer at the bottom of the lake, and thanks to this local population can live almost comfortably - according to African, of course, concepts.

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Flat-bottomed boats are located along the entire coastline. This picture is reminiscent of the streets of our cities with cars parked at the sidewalk, but only every boat owner here has a place historically assigned to him, which no one dares to take. Boats here are not a luxury and, in general, not even a means of transportation. They are necessary in order to extract salt. Every year, by joint efforts, people raise about twenty-five thousand tons of salt from the bottom, thereby deepening the lake. If earlier it was possible to ford it, now such walks, “like on land”, are practically impossible.
Every morning here begins with the fact that the local men come out of their houses and, stretching, head to the lake.

However, to call these buildings houses can only be a stretch. Yes, and shacks, too, they are hardly worth calling. These are original huts built from improvised means - reed stalks, car tires, plastic bags ... And visitors from neighboring countries(in our opinion, migrant workers). These people leave their native lands and rush to Senegal, because here, in the extraction of salt, you can earn about ten dollars a day - money, according to local concepts, is rather big, in their homeland - in Guinea, Mali, Gambia - they are talking about such a salary could not have dreamed. However, such happiness does not smile at them for too long, because no one can stand here for more than three years - salt water gradually corrodes the skin, and the person is covered with painful ulcers.

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So, in the early morning, guest workers head to their punts, untie them and go out to the lake expanses. Moving away from the coast, they drop anchor and lubricate the skin with the so-called Chinese vegetable oil, which is extracted from the fruits of the tallow tree. If this simple procedure is neglected, then the concentrated saline solution splashing over the side of the boat will corrode the skin almost to the bones in just half an hour.

Jumping over the side of the boat, the miners first with a special device, like a crowbar, loosen the salt that covers the bottom of the lake in a dense layer, and then fill the basket with it under water. The next step is to lift the basket and transfer its contents to the boat, after allowing the water to drain. The boat can hold up to 500 kilograms of salt. From the outside it seems surprising that a small boat with such a load does not sink. However, in order to flood a boat in the waters of the lake or drown yourself, you have to try very hard - a concentrated solution keeps both the loaded punt and the person afloat.
To earn the coveted ten dollars, the worker must deliver a boat filled with salt three times during the day. By the way, in order to load 500 kilograms of salt into the boat, experienced worker it takes at least three hours. Total: nine hours up to the shoulders in brine ...

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But then the miners bring heavy punts to the shore, and then their wives and daughters get down to business. The women's task is to shift the salt from the boat into basins, take it a little further from the water and pour it out there to dry. And a basin filled with salt, by the way, weighs at least 25 kilograms ...
After the salt dries, pebbles and litter are selected from it, and then poured into heaps that make the coast of Retba look like alien landscape. In such heaps, salt can lie for several years until a wholesale buyer is found for it. During this time, which at first had a gray color, under the rays of the sun it becomes dazzling white.

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No citizen of Senegal will stoop to become a salt miner. This is hard and thankless work. Therefore, local residents buy it in bulk and resell it to other African or European countries. And they also play the role of guides with pleasure, bringing tourists to an amazing lake with pink, like jelly, water and white milky, that is, salt, shores.

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Lake Retba is located less than an hour's drive from the capital of Senegal (40 km), on the northwestern coast of the country of Grand Côte, in close proximity to the shores of the Atlantic. It is most convenient to arrive here within the framework of organized excursion is a popular attraction and joining the tour is easy.

If you wish to arrive at the lake on your own, it makes sense to rent a car with a driver. The most unpretentious tourists can use the minibus service. And if you want to stay here for a few days, a considerable number of hotels are at your service. resort area Grand Cat.

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Retba separated from Atlantic Ocean just a strip of low dunes, and underground salt water The Atlantics generously feed this body of water, from which there is no outflow of water. So for thousands of years, the concentration of salt has increased here - and today Lake Retba, in terms of salinity in the dry period from November to June, easily “does” the hyped Dead Sea: the salt content in the water reaches 40%. By the way, the length of the lake is about 2 km, and the depth is no more than 3 meters.

The fantastic pink hue of the water is the result of the vital activity of a special kind of cyanobacteria that feed on salt. These bacteria produce a pink pigment in order to "attract" a certain spectrum of solar radiation necessary for their life. Well, then the pink pigment saturates the water in the Retba and colors its surface with amazing shades.

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The concentration of salt in Retba is so high that you can’t lie here with a book in your hands on the immovable surface of the lake - the mineral very soon begins to corrode the skin. As for the salt miners, they rub their bodies with shea butter, which prevents the insidious mineral from coming into contact with the surface of the skin.

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And on the other side of the Retba, facing the Atlantic, stretches a ridge of low graceful dunes. In a word, the landscapes here are really mesmerizing: snow-white mountains salt, bright pink water surface and golden sand of the Green Peninsula of Senegal.

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This lake is also often called Lac Rose (Lac Rose) .

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Rubbing their bodies with a special oil that protects against the damaging effects of incredibly salty water that corrodes the skin, salt miners spend the whole day on the lake. They dive to the bottom, blindly fill the baskets with salt, then unload it into the boat and take it to the shore. There, the catch is piled in heaps, allowed to dry, then washed and sorted, cleared of silt and sand. Burning out in the sun, the salt from the Pink Lake becomes snow-white, and this is what they bring for sale.

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But the few tourists who come to admire amazing lake with "bloody" water, they decide to plunge into the colored depths of Lac Rose. They prefer to observe from the sidelines and take a lot of pictures.

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Now consider a more effective appearance lake Hillier (Lake Hillier) in Australia.

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On the edge of Middle Island is a mysterious pink lake surrounded by legends. From above, the shiny surface of the pink Lake Hillier resembles icing on an oblong cake. This lake lends unexpected hues to a wooded corner of the Middle Island. The middle island is one of 100 small islands that make up the Research archipelago, stretching along south coast Western Australia. The most mysterious natural attraction in Australia is Lake Hillier and its pink water.

Photo 2.

A shallow salt lake, only about 600 m wide. An even greater impression of an unearthly landscape is given to the lake by a white ribbon around it. The lake is surrounded on all sides by bright green eucalyptus trees, separated from the ocean only by a narrow strip of white sand dunes.

Until the middle of the 20th century, people in explaining this phenomenon were content with the assumption that special bacteria live in the water of the lake. In 1950, the pink color of the lake was studied by a group of scientists who hoped to find seaweed in the salt water of the lake - Red algae (Dunaliella salina). In very salty water, these algae secrete a red pigment that turns other Australian lakes pink, such as on the mainland, near Esperance, located lake. A water sample taken from Lake Hillier did not find any traces of algae, so the color of the lake is still a mystery.

Photo 3.

The first mention of a “pink” lake on Sredny Island dates back to 1802, when the British navigator and hydrographer Matthew Flinders stopped here on his way to Sydney, who became the discoverer of the pink lake.

Over the next few decades, the island was a kind of transit point for whalers, but at the beginning of the 20th century, the attention of visitors finally turned to the miracle of nature, albeit from a very materialistic point of view - they began to mine salt here. However, the business did not flourish for long. Even taking into account the use of special equipment instead of traditional manual labor, the profit was not enough to grow the business, and the strange color of the water did not particularly attract the consumer. Six years later, entrepreneurs curtailed the project, and since then Hiller has attracted only curious tourists and occasionally scientists.

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In general, Lake Hillier is not the only pink lake even in Australia, not to mention bodies of similar coloring in other parts of the world. There are pink lakes on almost all continents - here are Retba in Senegal, and Torrevieja in Spain, and the Canadian Dusty Lake, and Masazir in Azerbaijan, and Koyashskoye Lake in the Crimea, and many others. But of all of them, the Australian Lake Hillier is the only one whose mystery has not yet been solved. After all, usually pink color is given to water either by special algae, or by cyanobacteria, or by specific chemicals in the composition of the forming rocks. And what “paints” Lake Hiller in such a bright color? Scientists are not yet able to answer this question. The results of studies conducted in 1950 showed the complete absence of any flowery microorganisms - both at the bottom of the reservoir and in the composition of the water.

Swimming in this wonderful lake, of course, is possible - but it happens at your own risk. After all, there are no spa baths, which are so common, for example, on the Dead Sea, here.

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There was a local legend about a sailor who ended up on the island after a shipwreck. Exhausted and wounded, he offered the devil to sell his soul so that he would save him from this nightmare. At the same moment, a man appeared on the shore of the lake, who poured into him a jug of blood and a jug of milk. Then he said: "Swim, and you will not feel hunger and pain." He did so, but acquired such strange abilities that the pirates who saved him, in the end, got scared and threw him back into the sea.

Let me remind you that studies of the water of the lake by scientists have not yielded any results. They did not find any bacteria or minerals capable of coloring the water pink.

Salt dissolved in lake water can be used as food. Therefore, for some time there were salt mines. In addition to nutritional benefits, this salt has medicinal properties, so there is still some truth in the legend of the sailor.

Photo 6.

Lake Hillier is only 600 meters wide. From all sides, the reservoir is surrounded by tall bright green eucalyptus trees, which contrast sharply with the pink water of the lake. The lake is located on the very edge of the island, and only a narrow strip of land, consisting mainly of sand dunes, separates it from the ocean. From a bird's eye view, the lake looks most impressive. The fact is that the shores of the lake are bordered by a thin layer of white salt, so from above it seems that the “pink spot” seems to be framed!
Thousands of tourists visit the island every year. They all want to see with their own eyes an unusual lake that looks so great against the backdrop of evergreen eucalyptus trees!

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