The History of Shoreline Stabilization on the Spanish Costa del Sol

Abstract

The assessment of failure or success in coastal stabilization depends on various factors. Most of the arguments for the implementation of coastal protection and/or stabilization rest on the need perceived by the local population, users and managers of a coastal stretch to stop shoreline recession or modify beach behaviour in some way. However, it is critical to establish at the onset of a process of beach stabilization what is the long-term trend of the beach system and, consider the long-term implications of maintaining any intervention in the coastal behaviour.

Costa del Sol in southern Spain is one of the most heavily developed coastal stretches in Europe (and the World) and is internationally renowned for attracting both mass- and high-income tourism. Annually more than nine million tourists visit the 100 km steep coastal segment, which supports a permanent population of over 1.2 million people. A significant proportion of the national economy is based (directly or indirectly) on tourism. Faced with threats to infrastructure from shoreline mobility, investing in coastal stabilization is the obvious response from the Public Administration, which is, by Law, responsible for the safe keeping of the shoreline and the Public maritime-terrestrial land around it.

The question considered here is: how healthy was the morphosedimentary system at the onset of mass tourism and how healthy is it now that up to 96% of some coastal council areas comprise consolidated urban land? When beaches began to suffer severe erosion in the 1970s, the question arose of whether to develop an alternative tourism economy based on golf courses and marinas or whether to try to stabilize and maintain a recreational beach system?

This paper provides an analysis of the environmental and socio-economic context and the sequence of shoreline stabilization approaches that have been applied but failed. Coastal stabilization techniques essentially attempt to stop nature from finding its equilibrium, but in Costa del Sol despite several major changes in strategy no approach has been successful.