The favourite Spanish holiday beaches that are slowly disappearing

 For decades, Spain’s beaches have drawn British tourists in their millions, but now some of the country’s most popular holiday destinations are at risk of disappearing.

Spanish authorities have been forced to destroy seafront buildings and other infrastructure to save disappearing sands as climate change causes water levels to rise.

Spain’s tourism boom, which began in the 1960s, quickly led to homes, roads and railways being built right next to the beaches.

However, rising sea levels and the growing number of severe storms caused by climate change have battered away at the beaches which draw tourists year after year.

A study last year found that beaches in provinces including Málaga and Cádiz in the south could shrink by up to 22 metres in the coming decades, with popular towns such as Marbella, Fuengirola, Torremolinos and Málaga City among places that could be most affected. The Greenpeace report added that some beaches in Mallorca could disappear entirely by the end of the century if trends continued.

With fewer natural defences like dunes, which help to keep the sand from being washed away, authorities in holiday resorts across the country have knocked down walkways, roads and other buildings near the coastline to reclaim beaches. They have also used sustainable methods to preserve them, such as building dunes.

Despite this growing effort to save a key asset to an industry which accounts for 12 per cent of GDP, experts predict that Spain will lose many beaches in the coming years as climate change worsens.

Aron Marcos, the head of environment at the council in Calafell, a town near Barcelona, which attracts upmarket British tourists, said the municipality relied “90 per cent on holidaymakers”.

However, the mixture of erosion and rising sea levels meant the beach was fast disappearing.

In order to preserve the beach, authorities have knocked down a walkway that was next to the sands.

It gained 2,000 cubic metres of sand for the beach – about the equivalent of 20 trucks full.

“At first, we thought the best thing would be to bring sand from elsewhere to help preserve the sea. But this was not sustainable. Experts said we should demolish the walkway on the beach and let it recover naturally through a dune,” he told The i Paper.

“In the next 100 years, beaches are going to change a lot. This will happen across Spain.”

In Vigo, a city in northwest Spain that is becoming popular with British tourists who want to escape the Mediterranean resorts, authorities spent €4m (£3.45m) to recover 500 metres of the beach.

A walkway was moved 25 metres back from the beach, revealing a dune beneath, and a road was also moved back.

Abel Caballero, the mayor of Vigo, an anglophile who got his doctorate in economics at the University of Cambridge, told The i Paper that previous city authorities had not respected natural resources.

Across the country, Spain’s government is now financing projects to preserve the country’s beaches.

“It is much better to go hand in hand with nature than to try to outwit it,” Hugo Morán, Secretary of State for the Environment Ministry, told El País newspaper.

Carla Garcia-Lozano, a doctor of physical geography at the University of Girona, said building close to beaches and constructing false beaches during the tourism boom of previous decades was partly to blame for the present problems.

She said shipping in sand had failed to solve the problem of beaches that were being eroded by storms or rising seas.

Dr Lozano, who is working on a project analysing the effectiveness of nature-based solutions to restore lost dunes and protect the coastline, said dunes were vital for saving beaches from coastal erosion and preserving biodiversity.

She studied dunes at 800 beaches in Catalonia. In 60 per cent of cases, the dunes had disappeared, while 30 per cent were degraded and the remainder were preserved.

“We will lose a lot of beaches in the medium term and will be able to protect others if we use natural solutions and remove buildings, but even with that, we will lose beaches because of coastal erosion,” she said.

Elvira Jimenez, spokeswoman for the coastal environment for Greenpeace in Spain, said: “Climate change is causing sea level rise and flooding which is impacting on the coastline on the one hand and there is a lot of infrastructure on the coastline, not only for tourism but also for housing or transport. We have some cases of some railways which are almost in the water near Barcelona.

“We still see some developments which do not take into account sea level rises. We have to reclaim the first part of the coastline which is where these ecosystems help to protect the effects of climate change.”