Storm Francis caused hundreds of problems in Andalusia. But if we have to choose just one (if only because of its iconic character), it would have a first and last name: Matalascañas.
And the town in Almont suffered even a preventive eviction due to the risk of collapsing a building next to its promenade. However, no one expected what the storm left behind.
More than four and a half kilometers of destruction. Specifically, 4.6 kilometers of walking completely destroyed and the collapse of entire stretches of beach; damage to at least three beach bars and many problems in the city’s treatment plant.
The first estimates they talk about three million euros only for urgent interventions, although no one expects that the complete recovery of all the razed infrastructure will take less than ten.
This is not the first time something like this has happened in Huelva, why is this important? Indeed, at this time last year we were talking about how it had disappeared El Portil beach in Punta Umbría. Huelva is one of the most sensitive points to coastal problems and its beaches are becoming areas in danger of extinction.
What has happened in Matalascañas is not important because it is new, nor even because it is unusually large. It is important because Francis has hit one of the iconic places of Spanish tourism.
It is, black on white, the confirmation that the problem is real and the solutions are difficult (and expensive).
Stop the world. Because the truth is that it is something that we want to stop a process that has always been there. Nearby, at the mouth of the Piedras River, is the ‘arrow of the Rompido’ a spit of sand that extends on the left bank of the river and that grows up to 80 meters a year. That is to say, the people of Huelva have very close examples that beaches are almost ‘living beings’.
As experts remember, the profile of the beaches “it constantly changes in response to changes in transverse sediment transport produced by marine dynamics, especially waves.” This “has never changed in all of history”, what has changed is that in recent decades it has begun to matter to us.
Because? Well, because the emergence of mass tourism starting in the 1960s turned beaches into a very valuable resource and filled them with investments, infrastructure and capital.
When the beaches began to change, we applied brute force: as we have explained on more than one occasion“the construction of breakwaters, the annual filling of beaches and the construction of coastal infrastructure to ‘secure’ the line have been the daily routine of our relationship with the beaches.”
The problem is that we have more and more investments in them, the problems become more critical and, for this reason, it is more expensive to insure them.
A race to nowhere (that we are not going to stop running). These days, experts they have spoken of losses of more than two meters per year and pointing to the role of the Juan Carlos I Jetty (13 km) in the alteration of currents and sedimentation dynamics.
Furthermore, the evacuations show that the current infrastructure cannot “hold” and that the changes that Matalascañas needs are much deeper than what a “reconstruction” would entail. And yet, the neighbors’ demands are logical and, possibly, will be attended to by the administration (even more so in an election year in Andalusia).
However, the question remains (and will continue) on the table: Will we be able to withdraw from the eroded front line in an orderly and fair manner? Will we be able to industrially reconvert that tourism into something that maintains jobs, families and population? Will we be able to understand that behind Matalascañas hides an entire country with an enormous problem?
Image | Luis Daniel Carbia Head
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