Practices Of Maintenance And Repair At The Mediterranean Coastline: Salou, Adapting A Coastal Touristic Settlement

Climate change requires understanding urban and natural contexts as constant processes in evolution. This framework determines an observation of places from an evolutionary rather than static conception. Coasts are dynamic systems where physical, geomorphological, geological, environmental, and urban-social transformations occur, a meeting point between sea, land and atmospheric conditions. This reality calls for understanding any intervention in the coastal space from a transdisciplinary analysis and decision-making caring for and decoding its dynamic nature. However, past interventions in this fragile area appear with an attitude of indifference towards nature´s processes and an ambition for human control. Today, the consequences of these traditions are revealed dramatically.
Rural coastal towns’ evolution into touristic settlements implied the rigidization of permeable agricultural land generating an entropic and fragmented territory due to the infrastructure at the service of mass tourism. The disappearance of dune systems, maritime pine forests, and the traditional ordering of agricultural plots eliminated the original drainage systems and altered the water cycle. Furthermore, second-home developments and their accessibility infrastructure blocked the continuity of water paths and obstructed the land-sea transit of sediments. Additionally, the seaside promenade becomes a critical built border for the natural performance of the dynamic coastal system and its adaptation to climate changes.
This research focuses on a fragment of the west Mediterranean coast where transformations from 1950s until today reveal intense coast alterations and their climatic repercussions. It addresses the current state and functioning of Salou´s urban coastline, a city in a vulnerable coastal system with a seaside promenade exposed to intense tourist pressure. Salou presents different artificial coastal milieus, none in their natural state.
The research evidences present problems due to past destructive actions on the coastline.