Dam construction is a millenary activity, carried out with the objective of fulfilling human necessities as water supply, land irrigation, water flow regularization, electric power generation, etc. Along the history, the design of these earthworks evolved from simple concepts, based on empirical techniques and rules of thumb, to modern analyses that consider all phases of a dam s life (construction, first reservoir filling, full operation) understatic and seismic loads, as well as complex boundary conditions and sophisticated constitutive relationships for the structure itself and the foundation mass. In this work, the construction, first reservoir filling and the seismic response of the Pomacocha Dam, located in Peru, are analyzed by the finite element method using the software ABAQUS (version 6.2). At several loading stages the corresponding stress and displacement are presented as well as, for some specific points in the dam body and in the foundation soil, the characteristic stress and strain histories during the static and seismic loads.