to think that the beach of your childhood was going to be how you remember it

For decades, coastal architecture was built on such a simple idea as wrongas if the beach of our childhood, the same one we retain in our memories, were going to remain intact forever. Matalascanas is the most recent reminder of a failure of origin: beaches are not everlasting decorations, they are borders that sooner or later are eaten by the ocean.

A poorly thought out coast. In Matalascanasthe sea no longer advances in the abstract or in technical reports: it is literally entering the courtyardsdemolishes beach bars and turns boardwalks into twisted rubble. What for decades was a wide, stable beach has lost its protective sand, leaving homes and infrastructure exposed to increasingly stormy weather. more frequent and intense.

Built in the sixties and seventies in a high natural erosion zonewithout studies of coastal dynamics and dune systems that acted as a barrier, urbanization embodies the clash between an architecture designed for a fixed sea and a coast that was always in motion. The storms of 2026 have done nothing more than accelerate an announced process for years, generating a feeling of abandonment and urgency in neighbors who see how emergency solutions arrive late and are never definitive.

Exception turned into routine. What happened after Storm Francis was not an isolated episode, but rather the start of a sequence. Just weeks later, a new storm has once again placed water at the doors of houses, sweeping away beach bars and reopening unclosed wounds.

Erosion is no longer a future threat but has become in a permanent stateaggravated by the lack of coordination between administrations and by provisional actions that barely buy time. In Matalascañas it is no longer discussed whether the sea will advance, but rather how much and at what pacewhile the natural balance that allowed the beach to recover after storms has been broken for two decades.

Science takes on the unthinkable. What neighbors experience as a local tragedy, science has been formulating for some time as a global dilemma. Studies in the UK in 2022 now they had warned that hundreds of thousands of coastal homes could be exposed or directly abandoned in a few decades, because protecting them will be economically and technically unfeasible.

The message is uncomfortable, but quite clear: there will be communities that must retreat inland. The sea not only rises, it also erodes the beaches and raises the point from which the waves break, multiplying the impact of each storm and rendering many traditional defenses useless.

Beaches and economies at risk. On a planetary scale, the erosion of sandy beaches is advancing rapidly. uneven but persistent. A significant part of the world’s sandbanks is already receding and projections point to severe losses before mid-century.

Tourism, frontline urbanization, ports, dams and dune destruction have eliminated natural reservoirs of sand that allowed the beaches to adapt. In regions highly dependent on coastal tourism, such as the Spanish Mediterranean, the disappearance of the beach is not only an environmental problem, but a direct threat to the economic and social fabric built around it.

And the north, the same. Of course, it is not just a problem for Spain. In Scotland, for example, Montrose beach loses meters of sand every year at a rate that even exceeds scientific forecasts. Collapsed promenades, weakened dunes and historic golf courses devoured by the sea show that the problem does not distinguish latitudes.

The proposed solutions, such as artificial regeneration with sand, are expensive and recurringa structural expense that is difficult to assume for indebted administrations. The question, again, stops being how to stop erosion and becomes how long can it be buy before the defenses give way.

Shrinking cities. In large urban areas such as the same New Yorkthe rising sea threatens tens of thousands of homes in a context of serious housing shortage.

I remembered a few months ago the new york times that there the withdrawal is no longer just coastal, but urban: buying houses, demolishing them and returning the land to the water becomes an adaptation strategywhile large protection projects advance slowly and force us to rethink the classic housing model. The coast stops being a place to grow and becomes a mobile border that determines the future of the city.

Save house or beach. In the United States, the advance of the sea is of such magnitude that it has reactivated a legal conflict inherited from centuries: the beaches as a public good against the right to protect private property.

The walls and breakwaters that save a house condemn the beach by disappearing, causing the call “coastal choke”. The consequence is a waterfall of judicial conflictswhere each individual defense accelerates the erosion of the environment and forces neighbors to follow the same path, until there is no sand left to defend. A “national” problem that aims to be global.

Adapt without going out of your way. Of course, all kinds of solutions are being tried. I remembered a few months ago the Guardian the case of the Pacific coast of Colombia, where communities like Juanchaco face erosion from a different logic. Without major works or resources for a total withdrawal, they opt to internal displacementscommunity tourism and progressive adaptation.

The sea carries away streets and houses, but the community responds by moving a few meters inland, reinventing its economy and preserving its cultural identity. It is a form of resistance that assumes physical loss without giving up territory. A solution that seems impossible in depending on which enclaves.

Houses fall, value sinks. A few months ago it went viral a series of snapshots. Images of homes collapsing on the beaches of North Carolina seemed absurd until you understand their logic. Many were built at a safe distance from the sea, when architecture never imagined that the beaches would change, building on dunes that no longer exist.

Accelerated erosion has turned those investments in trapped assetsdifficult to move, expensive to insure and, quite possibly, condemned to disappear. It is not an individual failure, but the result of decades of betting on a fixed coast in a system that was always mobile. Each house that falls carries not only debris, but environmental and economic costs that end up distributed among everyone.

The end of a coastal illusion. In short, since Matalascanas until Scotlandpassing through New York and the Colombian Pacifichistory repeats itself with local nuances: coastal architecture was designed for a world that simply no longer exists.

If you also want, the sea is not suddenly invading us, it is simply claiming space. The exceptional has become routine and the big question is no longer how to resist as if it were not happening, but rather how to adapt as best as possible to a coast that moves, accepting that many beaches, houses and walks they will not be able to continue where they are.

Image | Paula SuarezDaniel Lombraña González, Image EditorDronepicr, Picryl

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