The Spanish River is a river in Algoma District, Sudbury District and Greater Sudbury in Northeastern Ontario, Canada. It flows in a southerly direction from its headwaters at Spanish Lake (west branch) and Duke Lake (east branch) to its mouth at the North Channel of Lake Huron just outside the community of Spanish. 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 taken captive during an expedition far to the south. The Spanish River is a provincially significant canoe route with lots of swifts and whitewater. It is therefore mainly used for recreational canoeing and has been protected as a waterway provincial park. There are four hydroelectric dams on the river: one, known as Big Eddy, above High Falls forming Agnew Lake; High Falls dam about a kilometre below Big Eddy dam; Nairn Falls dam about below High Falls and the other at the Domtar mill in Espanola. Geography 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 River, Agnes River, the River aux Sables, the Vermilion River and the Wakonassin River. 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 the form of provincial parks and reclamation acts. History The Spanish River has been used as a transportation corridor for thousands of years, initially by First Nations and later in the 19th century by fur traders. During the late 19th and mid 20th centuries, the river 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 in 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