A good knowledge of hydraulic characteristics, particularly the retention curves, of the applied materials is necessary when studying the efficiency of a capillary barrier or numerically simulating flow of water in its layers. The main difficulties of their measurements originate in the fact that the coarse-grained soils of capillary barriers come from the state of residual moisture to the state of saturation within relatively small interval of pressure head. Hence, it is necessary to carry out the measurements in very fine steps of pressure head. Four materials of two capillary barriers are investigated in this paper. The tension apparatus according to Havlíček and Myslivec was used to measure their retention curves. Both branches of retention curves were measured in order to obtain data suitable for taking hysteresis into account. The method is described and the results are presented. Subsequently, the hydraulic characteristics of the materials are determined and their impact to the capillary barriers efficiency is investigated. The barriers were compared from the viewpoint of their efficiency using the measured data and tipping trough measurements made elsewhere. Explanation of the found differences was suggested and the effect of hysteresis was discussed., Dagmar Trpkošová and Jiří Mls., and Obsahuje bibliografii