The dam wall
From the viewpoints.
acediscovery — CC BY 4.0 · Gabriel Resende Veiga — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Deyvid Aleksandr Raffo Setti e Eloy Olindo Setti — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Rafaelpietsch — CC BY-SA 4.0
Itaipu is a giant hydroelectric plant on the Paraná River on the border of Brazil and Paraguay, owned by the two countries in equal shares. It was built under a treaty signed in 1973, with work running into the mid-1980s, and it is the second-largest hydroelectric plant in the world by electricity produced, after the Three Gorges Dam in China. It has twenty generating units of 700 megawatts each, 14 gigawatts in all: ten run at 50 hertz for Paraguay and ten at 60 hertz for Brazil, and the plant supplies about 15 per cent of the electricity Brazil uses and most of Paraguay's. When it was built, its reservoir drowned the famous Guaíra Falls and displaced thousands of families. Tours leave from the visitor centre north of the city: the panoramic tour by bus takes about an hour and ten minutes, stopping at viewpoints over the dam wall and spillways, and the special tour, about two and a half hours, goes inside the plant. Tours run at set times, so book ahead.
From the viewpoints.
When open after rain.
On the special tour.
Visitor Centre, north of Foz do Iguaçu
The panoramic tour of about 1h10 is enough to see the dam from outside; the special tour is longer and pricier and goes inside the plant.