Sun but no sand? How coastal erosion is making Spain’s beaches disappear

22.09.2024 - 22:48 / euronews.com

Blazing heat, prolonged drought and heavy downpours: Spain’s chaotic weather has made tourists think twice about visiting the Mediterranean country in 2024.

With temperatures soaring to 40°C in some places, the lure of sunshine has started to become a deterrent.

The other half of the ‘sol y playa’ tourism model is also at risk as the climate changes - Spain’s beaches are starting to disappear due to rising sea levels and extreme weather.

“We observed that there are many beaches in Spain already affected by erosion, particularly when there are strong waves during winter storms,” says Markus Donat, who co-leads the Climate Variability and Change Group within Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s (BSC) Earth Sciences Department. 

During storms at Easter, some Barcelona beaches faced unprecedented sand loss of up to 25 metres in width.

Experts warn that this could become a worrying trend - with potentially devastating impacts on Spain’s thriving tourism industry.

Climate change is expected to accelerate the frequency and violence of storms in the future. 

“The biggest problem is the greater frequency of maritime storms, whose waves affect the first line of the coast and cause huge damage to beaches and coastal facilities, such as marinas and promenades,” explains Jorge Olcina, professor of geography at the University of Alicante. 

This could lead to the beaches shrinking, with a loss of the usable sand available for holidaymakers.

“This problem requires significant economic investments every three or four years to repair the beaches and promenades,” says Jorge.

The Spanish government has said for decades that the country’s coastline suffers from the “generalised process of coastal regression”, and has invested millions into replacing sand on degraded beaches. But in the long term, it warns it will not be possible to keep up with requests from all the municipalities that request such help.

And it’s far from over. “Some conservative models assume that the sea level will rise from half a metre to one metre by the end of the century,” says Markus. “However, these estimates do not include some factors that are not well understood - for example, the impact of the melting ice of the Antarctic. So this could increase predicted increases substantially.”

Some Spanish regions are more vulnerable than others - among them, Catalonia.

Across northeastern Spain, rising sea levels and winter storms have been eating away at the shoreline. A 2017 report by the regional government suggests that 164 km of the region’s coastline - out of a total of 218 km studied - is at high or very high risk of erosion. Half of the beaches are expected to “deteriorate”.

In Barcelona, whose artificial beaches were installed 30 years ago when the city was