A sign at Platja Gran, the ‘Great Beach,’ warns of falling rocks. Beaches are disappearing in many places around the world, including Spain. — EMILIO RAPPOLD/dpa
Looking out onto the beach of Platja d’Aro, Josep has tears in his eyes.
“I used to play and swim here as a kid, when the beach was twice as big,” the 48-year-old teacher says.
Today the main beach in the popular Catalonian holiday resort on Spain’s Costa Brava coastline is some 50m wide on average. In the 1980s, it was three times that size, according to a report in the La Vanguardia newspaper.
Estimates differ and there are no official figures available, but everyone agrees that the beach has been getting “smaller and smaller” for decades, restaurant owner Aldo says.
Beaches are also vanishing elsewhere in Spain, a country that depends heavily on the millions of holidaymakers from Europe and elsewhere that descend on its coastlines every year.
But beaches are literally shrinking and experts believe urban development is one of the reasons for the erosion.
Protective dunes along the coast have been replaced by housing, hotels and marinas, preventing the beaches from expanding inwards.
“Natural beaches can easily adapt to climate change as they are able to retreat and rise when the sea level rises,” says Francesa Ribas from Barcelona’s Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
But if buildings prevent the sand from shifting inwards, the beach will disappear, she explains.
Turning dunes into promenades has restricted the beaches’ adaptability and increased the risk of storm surges, according to Ribas.
River dams near the coast and the construction of marinas and other infrastructure near the sea are also fuelling erosion, she adds.
Bleak outlook
The phenomenon isn’t unique to Spain, with beaches disappearing in coastal regions from California and Florida to Turkiye, Brazil and Australia’s Gold Coast.
Driven by climate change, “sea-level rise and coastal shifts could wipe out nearly half of Earth’s sandy seashores by the end of the century”, according to a study published in the Nature Climate Change journal.
The city administration of Barcelona estimates that some 30,000cu m of sand are being washed away there every year, some 10% of its beaches.
“I was completely surprised when I noticed massive regression on some beaches in the Llobregat delta south of Barcelona a few years ago, an area that hadn’t had any problems with erosion so far,” Ribas remembers.
Several international studies carried out between 1984 and 2015 using satellite images found some 25% of beaches worldwide affected by chronic erosion, the researcher says.
In Spain’s Catalonia, as many as 65% of beaches in the region shrunk between 1956 and 2019, according to the Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia (ICGC).The drama of Montgat
According to Greenpeace, the beach of Montgat, a town north of Barcelona, has lost 90% of its sand, decreasing from 25,000 to 6,400sq m in size since July 2023 alone.
The town even considered cancelling the summer season following a particularly devastating storm earlier this year.
“We barely had enough room to put up a lifeguard chair,” Tania González, the city councillor in charge of environmental affairs, told the El Periódico newspaper.
The situation has since improved somewhat, and the Montgat beach, which used to measure some 50m a decade ago, has grown back into a two-metre-wide strip.
For Mayor Andreu Absil, that’s no reason to rejoice, however. The town was forced to close all restaurants and bars along the beach due to the erosion, he says.
Demand for action
Coastal erosion has alarming consequences, particularly for Spain’s tourism industry, one of the main sources of income in Catalonia and beyond.
Ribas also highlights the risks for a “very valuable ecosystem”.
“Beaches are the best possible protection against storms for the
adjacent cities, as they absorb the energy of the waves,” she says. “If there is no beach, storms have a much more destructive effect.”
More and more people in Catalonia and other affected coastal regions across Spain are joining forces to raise awareness and call for action to address the problem.
A group of people recently formed a human chain in Valencia to draw attention to disappearing beaches, while the SOS Costa Brava organisation put on an open-air theatre performance near Platja d’Aro to illustrate the ecological consequences of rampant urban development.
Attitudes are shifting, not only in Spain but worldwide, Ribas says.
In Spain, stricter building regulations are now in place in many parts of the country and the coastal law has been tightened, she says.
However, construction continues along the coast, with many building illegally.
Pau Bosch, vice president of SOS Costa Brava, an umbrella organisation for 25 environmental groups, says the organisation’s efforts to prevent further building projects are paying off.
A master plan for the protection of various conservation areas along the coast that were supposed to be destroyed has been approved in Catalonia and other regions, he says.
However, there are still plans to build a total of 40,000 new homes and hotel complexes in 22 municipalities on the Costa Brava, “which will have a very negative impact on the coastline and the sea.”
What does it take to save Spain’s beaches?
To stop erosion, authorities have brought in sand from regions as far away as the Sahara desert to fill up the declining beaches.
But those efforts, branded by ecologists as “patchwork”, are to be reduced in future, partly due to a huge global sand shortage.
Other efforts to combat the problem included putting up protective structures that only brought short-term relief or were even counter-productive.
Ribas believes there’s only one way to save Spain’s beaches.
“We have to give back to the sea what we have stolen from it,” she says.
“We need to restore the original dune systems and, if necessary, dismantle beach promenades and rebuild them further back.”
Renaturation, the researcher believes, is the only option, even if it may prove unpopular. – dpa
