Punctually, before 9:00 in the morning, the demolition work on the Escola de Vela building began in Platja d’Aro. The City Council has accelerated it after some walls gave way on Monday and their state of ruin and emergency action were declared. It is expected that the demolition and removal of debris will be completed with this first action, and that soon the concrete will also be removed from the rubble and the beach will be cleaned. Regarding the section of the promenade between the Ridaura river and Port d’Aro, which is cut off, Mayor Mauricio Jiménez has explained that a rockery will be created to consolidate the receding dune. School activity will resume with temporary equipment.
The work to demolish the Platja d’Aro Sailing School building (Baix Empordà), located on the town’s Riuet beach, began this Friday at 8:30 am. It was done “urgently” after the building began to collapse on Monday. “We have accelerated the machinery so that Costas could make a quick intervention to guarantee security in this environment,” explained the mayor of the municipality, Mauricio Jiménez.
The forecast is that with this first day of work the entire construction can be demolished, as well as the debris removed. Soon, the concrete will also be removed from the foundations and the beach will be left clean so that the population and tourists can access it “in complete safety and without any remains of the work.”
The building that is being demolished was built by the Platja d’Aro City Council in the mid-1980s, “to promote nautical activity in the municipality and bring the sea closer to the citizens.” The council maintains this desire, although it is aware that “the original space cannot be recovered because the current weather conditions mean that buildings can no longer be built on the sand.”
Along these lines, Jiménez has detailed that the nautical activity of the Escola de Vela will resume in the coming weeks. For now, the City Council plans to do so with temporary equipment, either by installing mobile modules or making use of Port d’Aro facilities.
The demolition is accompanied by a second action which is the “consolidation of access and mobility” of the stretch of promenade between the mouth of Ridaura and Port d’Aro. This will be, as the mayor has announced, “a work very similar to what was done in 2020 in the northern area of ??the promenade, which had been affected by the Gloria storm.” Specifically, it involves consolidating the dune with a rockery that prevents it from being hit by the waves.
In this sense, the mayor recalled that, after the modification, “the project will have to be updated” for the construction of a footbridge over the Ridaura, which will connect the promenade of Platja d’Aro with the Port d’Aro area and the Riuet sector, “to ensure that it conforms to the reality of the picket line after the works”.
In general terms, Jiménez has also said that Platja d’Aro “is not an isolated case”, but rather that climate change is affecting other coastal towns. For this reason, he believes that “the projects will have to be rethought, because we have to withdraw more from the sea than a few years ago.” In addition, he recalled that there has been no easterly wind in the town for a long time and that this has caused the garbí, which blows from the southwest, to have pushed all the sand towards the north, even removing the shoes of buildings such as the Escola de Vela.
