With each storm there is a destroyed promenade, flooded houses or loss of sand that even cause the disappearance of some beach.
The city councils are clamoring for solutions that save the season and soliviate the neighborhood critics.
And, normally, with a request, the reconstruction of those paths and the installation of breakwaters or breakwaters that what they do is move the problem to the next town.
Currently, between the port of Castellón and that of Valencia there are 60 breakwaters, according to Enric Amer, from Acció Ecologista Agró, who does not see the breakwaters as the solution for regeneration but as the political response to neighborhood protests.
"The solution is neither to put more breakwaters nor to double the ones that already exist, as some municipalities are asking, because they are rigid obstacles, just like the promenades and constructions, which prevent natural regeneration."
The ecologist explains that the waves used to break with less force because there were sand reefs and dune ridges from which the sea removed sediment in winter but returned it in summer.
That is why he bets, as is being done in Europe, to study the possibility of adding more sediment to the sea,
The professor of Ports and Coasts of the Institute of Transport and Territory of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Vicent Esteban Chapapría, provides another solution: the creation of artificial reefs for the regeneration of beaches and the protection of the coasts.
This method is already being implemented in Florida and, submerged and parallel to the coast, they are reducing the volume of waves with a system that is also reversible and more sustainable, since they are built with recycled material.
But the proposals, for the moment, have gone the other way or even the opposite.
For example, Costas has proposed extracting part of a submerged dune ridge off the coast of Cullera to regenerate the degradation of the beaches.
Enric Amer has spent decades studying the behavior of the coastline south of Castellón and north of Valencia.
"Whenever you build a breakwater, you create a new beach to the north and reduce it to the south."
This is so and is known by the General Directorate of Coasts: “Partial solutions do not seem to have had optimal results in the past;
quite the contrary, they have served to create new imbalances”, they point out in the report
Strategies for the protection of the South coast of Castellón
.
However, the first action of this strategy, approved in 2015, has been the construction of four breakwaters in the Castellón town of Almenara that are already causing the result that Professor Esteban Chapapría predicted before they were raised: erosive effects and new sedimentary imbalances on the beaches of Sagunto as well as "the appearance of gravel and its propagation towards the south in very important magnitudes".
So much so that the residents of the beaches of Almardà, Corinto and Malvarrosa de Sagunto have filed a complaint, admitted in Europe, for the lack of protection in which its coast has been left against storms.
The performance in Almenara responds to years of vindication.
The 2017 storm destroyed the promenade.
The effects of the danas, like the one in 2019, and other storms meant that the three-kilometre beach was left in the middle, with the sea already on the promenade and affecting homes and infrastructure.
"It was fair to carry them out," said the mayor, Estíbaliz Pérez.
The Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, during a visit to the start of the works, assured that it was the “starting flag for the implementation of the strategies for adapting the coastline in our country to climate change”.
According to Morán, it was the implementation "of adaptation strategies, so Almenara opens a route that has to be repeated section by section of the coastline of our country in the coming years."
Double breakwater to the south of which causes regression in the houses of Queralt, in Sagunto.Acció Ecologista Agró
At the moment, Sagunto has already managed to get some contributions of sand that have not satisfied the neighbors since the storms of two months ago have already carried away 75% of it.
"If the City Council is strong, they will get a jetty and the problem will go to Canet," says the ecologist.
The lack of a true common strategic direction for the entire coastline and the excess of discretion over the years in the approval of regeneration projects are the real problem, both for the member of Agró and for the professor.
