- location Unorganized Sudbury Discharge 150 m³/s Source Biscotasi Lake | Length 338 km Province Ontario Mouths Lake Huron, North Channel | |
 | ||
- location Unorganized Sudbury, Sudbury District - location Unorganized Sudbury, Sudbury District - location Spanish, Algoma District - average 150 m/s (5,300 cu ft/s) Cities Greater Sudbury, Espanola, Spanish, Walden Similar Lake Huron, Mississagi River, Chutes Provincial Park, Lake Wanapitei, Lake Panache | ||
The Spanish River is a river in Algoma District, Sudbury District and Greater Sudbury in Northwestern Ontario, Canada. It flows 338 kilometres (210 mi) in a southerly direction from its headwaters at Spanish Lake (west branch) and Duke Lake (east branch) to its mouth at the North Channel on Georgian Bay, Lake Huron just outside the community of Spanish.
Contents
Map of Spanish River, Ontario, Canada
The river is located almost entirely within the Sudbury District, except for brief passages into the city of Greater Sudbury near the communities of High Falls and Turbine and the river mouth in Algoma District.
Tributaries include Pogamasing Creek, Mogo Creek, Agnes River, the Aux Sables River, the Vermilion River and the Wakonassin River.
The river's name and the name of the nearby towns of Espanola and Spanish are said to be due to French explorers and Jesuit priests encountering Ojibwe peoples speaking Spanish in the area, apparently as a result of a Spanish woman having been taking captive during an expedition far to the south.
The Lower Spanish River Forest houses the world's oldest red pine and white pine forests, and much of that is under provincial protection, in form of provincial parks and reclamation acts.
History
This river has been used as a transportation corridor for thousands of years, first by First Nations and later in the 19th century by fur traders. During the late 19th and mid 20th centuries, it was used to transport timber from logging camps in the upper Sudbury District to Georgian Bay, where they were towed by tugs to sawmills on the Great Lakes. Until the mid-1960s pulp wood, mainly jack pine, was driven down the river to the paper mill at Espanola. A diesel tug towed large rafts of logs the length of Agnew Lake to big Eddy dam where they were sluiced down a flume by crews with hand held pike poles. Secondary flumes took them past the High Falls and Nairn Falls power plants and on to Espanola. The sap and bark from the pulp logs was a major pollution source in the lower river.
Today the river is mainly used for recreational canoeing and has been protected as a waterway provincial park. All park sites and portages are currently maintained by park staff. There are four hydroelectric dams on the river: one, known as Big Eddy, above High Falls forming Lake Agnew; High Falls dam about a kilometer below Big Eddy dam; Nairn Falls dam about 12 km below High Falls and the other at the Domtar mill in Espanola.