Göygöl is a lake of deep blue in the Lesser Caucasus of western Azerbaijan, near the city of Ganja, made in a single night in 1139 when an earthquake tore the flank off Mount Kapaz and dammed the Aghsu river below with the rubble, and it is walked to through beech forest to a path that breaks out of the trees with the lake lying below end to end. The name means blue lake, and the wall holding it in place is nothing but the debris of the collapsed mountain, which should have failed, since most natural dams of its kind break within a year, but has held for nearly nine centuries; the same collapse left a chain of smaller lakes higher in the mountains, and the trout in Göygöl are river fish with nowhere to go, shut in above the new rock wall in 1139 and breeding among themselves ever since. Across the water stands Kapaz itself, 3,065 metres, with the scar of the fall on its face, and the shore is ringed by beech, hornbeam and oak that turn gold and rust through October, repeated upside down in the still water, in a national park where the lake is watched from the path rather than swum.
The trails go up. Above the forest belt the trees give out and the slope opens into rough grassland, grazed and quiet, with the lake a blue oval below and the ranges running toward Armenia, and a forest trail climbs from Göygöl to Maralgöl, a smaller lake left by the same landslide and set higher, that few visitors bother with. The lake was a resort of the German colonists who settled the valley in the nineteenth century, and their village of Helenendorf, now Göygöl town, still has its Lutheran church and stone houses below the park. Access to the lake is by permit at the park gate, and the water is closed to boats. Göygöl is a lake a mountain made by falling, and the wall it left has never broken.