Canoas Canoas papyrus to papyrus together on Lake Tana. In Woito are built the famous papyrus canoes, are also found in the Palace Bezawit and a local market. Lake Tana (also spelled T'ana; previously written as Dambea Tsana or) is the largest lake in Ethiopia, source of the Blue Nile. The lake is located in the highlands northwest of the country, to 1,840 meters, and is about 84 km long and 66 km wide. The maximum depth is 15 m and covers an area of ??2,156 km ². The lake receives its water from rivers Reb, Gumara, Lesser Abay, Kilti and Magech. The lake is about thirty islands and islets, whose number varies according to the level of the lake has dropped about two meters in the last 400 years. According to Manoel de Almeida (a sixteenth century Portuguese missionary), the lake was 21 islands, seven or eight of which had monasteries on them "formerly large, but now much reduced." When Robert Bruce visited the area in the late eighteenth century, seated left that locals had 45 inhabited islands, but he believed that there were only eleven. A newer geographer mentions 37 islands, of which 19 have and have had monasteries or churches. In monasteries isolated from these islands were buried the remains of Ethiopian emperors. On the island of Tana Cherqos there was a rock in which, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary rested on her way back from Egypt, is also said to Frumentius, who introduced Christianity to Ethiopia would be buried in Tana Cherqos. Amlak Yekuno body was buried in the monastery of San Esteban, in the Isle Dagger, Dagger also contains the tombs of the emperors Dawit I, Zara Yaqob, Za Dengel and Fasilides. Other major islands of the lake are Dek Island and Meshralia. It is thought that monasteries were built on earlier religious sites and include Debre Maryam and Dega Estefanos fourteenth century Narga Selassie, Tana Cherkos (where according to Ethiopian tradition would have been the Ark of the Covenant), and Ura Kidane Mecet nineteenth century. There is a ferry service that connects Bahir Dar with Gorgora through Dek Island and several villages on the edge of the sea.