There’s plenty of things that Portugal is famous for – Port wine, pretty tiles, pastel de nata, for example – but its beaches, particularly the ones in the Algarve, are up there with its biggest draws.
However, certain stretches of the country’s coast seem to be going missing. Why? Well, because the entire region is suffering the impacts of coastal erosion.
This is a phenomenon along all coastlines, but Portugal’s position at the edge of the choppy North Atlantic means it’s particularly vulnerable. The ferocious waves here are why the country is so popular for surfing, after all.
Local governments have been adding more sand to the beaches to try and combat this, as well as doing construction work to prevent further damage from landslides, which are both common ‘soft’ engineering methods to mitigate erosion.
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Fuseta-Mar beach in Olhão has had 80,000 cubic metres of sand added, which is known as beach nourishment, but there are still concerns about its durability for the upcoming summer season.
‘We really need to justify opening an emergency competition so that [the work] is ready at the start of the bathing season,’ said Portugal’s environment minister Maria da Graça Carvalho, according to Daily Jang, ‘Without emergency intervention, it will be difficult to have this ready for the beach season. From what we saw and the opinions of the technicians who were with us, we really have justification to move forward.’
It was confirmed back in April that funding for 150,000 cubic metres of sand was available, which hypothetically will be used to restore a 600-metre-long, 30-metre-wide part of the coast. However, it’s still up to the Portuguese Environment Agency to justify an emergency tender.
What is coastal erosion?
Put simply, coastal erosion is the natural process of the sea wearing away the land. This happens in a few different ways – by the force of the waves themselves, or the force of debris from the sea, such as pebbles, being tossed at the coastline.
Seawater is also capable of dissolving certain rock types, such as chalk or limestone – which is the primary rock type in the Algarve – forcing cliff faces to weaken and gradually retreat over time.
However, it can be exacerbated by a bunch of factors, such as storms, extreme tides, climate change and human activities. The Portuguese Environment Agency estimates that between 1958 and 2021, a staggering 1320 hectares of land have disappeared.
A rather sombre bit of research was conducted in 2020 and predicts (in a ‘worst case’ scenario) the country could lose up to 40 percent of its beaches in the next 80 years.
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