The Impact of Man on the Shoreline Environment of the Costa Del Sol, Southern Spain

Abstract

The Costa del Sol is one of the world’s most developed coasts. Over the past 40 years much of the natural coastline has been destroyed and replaced with tourist-related urban facilities, including high rise apartments, condominiums and hotels. The urban shorefront has become a zone of conflict, as engineers have tried to stem progressive erosion through the construction of seawalls, bulkheads, groynes and breakwaters. The performance of these structures has ranged from satisfactory to poor, in some places exacerbating beach loss and shoreline recession. At Estepona and Marbella, groynes built in the 1960s have recently been removed to assist in stabilising the beach. The environmental stress on the physical resources of the coast may be traced to spiralling demands for water and aggregates. Low seasonal rainfall leads to large-scale water regulation in order to guarantee supplies for agriculture and the urban areas, and this in turn has reduced coastal stream discharge to the point where many rivers are dry for seven to nine months a year. Consequently, sediment delivery to the coast is minimised, and this has resulted in beach erosion, especially along the flanks of deltas. An additional problem arises from the extraction of sand and gravel for construction and agricultural purposes, further depleting beach levels. Also, the recent construction of marinas along the coast has encouraged remobilisation of beach sediment and facilitated its transport onto the shelf. The current phase of large-scale beach nourishment is serving to recycle these materials. There is growing awareness and, inevitably, concern about the future of the Costa del Sol environment, as embodied in recent national and regional directives aimed at reducing stress.