Mambakkam Lake (Water bodies of Chennai - 70)

Located at about 15 km from Tambaram, the southern suburb of Chennai, Mambakkam Lake is one of the most picturesque water bodies in the surroundings of Chennai. The beauty of the vast lake brings a lot of bikers for an early morning ride. Spreading over an area of around 200 acres, it is located near the Kayar Reserve Forest.

Interestingly not many know that the other part of the lake lies about 5 km from here, right in the middle of Mambakkam village. That part of the lake occupies around 100 acres. Hence, it is evidently a sad story that all these highways, main roads, and thousands of residences lying between these two parts of the lake have encroached on the otherwise much bigger lake. 

Similar to many other facts about the city's water bodies, it also remains a piece of unrecorded and neglected information. 

Happy travelling.

Note: As per a report, there were about 650+ waterbodies in the Chennai region till the 1980s. Today, only a fraction of them exist. Most of those surviving waterbodies hardly have water, and even some of them that have water had been poorly shrunk. In Chennai, there are tank roads without tanks nearby and lake-view roads without any lake in the vicinity. There is a high possibility that even the few water bodies we have today might vanish soon. I thought of visiting the currently surviving waterbodies of Chennai and its suburbs and write about them in my blog as a series.