Song Rac Lake

A large lake lies among the forested mountains of Hà Tĩnh, and whenever heavy rain comes, the whole plain to the south has reason to be thankful for it. This is Sông Rác Lake, in Cẩm Xuyên. The people of the region know it well. For anyone standing before its wide water for the first time, with green mountains all around, the story behind the lake is the part that stays in the mind.

Sông Rác Lake was not made to receive visitors. A provincial document from 2026 lists it as a large reservoir with gates that control floods. It holds 124.5 million cubic meters of water. On the ground, that number has a plain meaning. According to the Hà Tĩnh newspaper, the lake supplies farming and daily life for 20 communes. Six are in the south of Cẩm Xuyên, and 14 are in the north of Kỳ Anh. It also waters more than 5,000 hectares of fields in every crop season.

The building of the lake was the work of a whole generation. The same newspaper records that the Sông Rác construction site was set up in June 1986. Work began that very year, and by 1991 the main parts of the project were largely complete. That makes five years of construction, at a time when the country still faced many hardships after the war. Looking at the calm surface of the lake today, a person can think of all the effort that went into creating it.

The lake also has a tourism future on paper. The land-use plan of Hà Tĩnh province includes an entry for an ecotourism area at the lake. It covers 5 hectares in Cẩm Xuyên, for the period from 2023 to 2025. A road into that area also appears in a list of infrastructure projects for Cẩm Lạc commune. It is a promise of a place to rest, quite different from noisy beaches or busy streets.

But what stays with a visitor may not be any service or facility. It is the feeling of standing on the shore early in the morning, when the still water holds the green of the far mountains. Then a person thinks of the people who gave five years of their strength to build a lake that holds 124.5 million cubic meters of water. They did it not for themselves, but for 20 communes of their home region.