Neus Pi, a retired teacher from Begur, remembers when the Sa Riera cove was “the adventure playground” for the four or five children who lived in that corner of the Costa Brava in the 1950s and 1960s. when they played at building cabins among the boxes of fish catches and when the basement of the house where he was born frequently flooded during the easterly storms. “My house was in the water,” she recalls. Something that today is unthinkable.
Tons of sand have been deposited on this Baix Empordà beach, one of the few on the Catalan coast that gains meters year after year. An unusual phenomenon and worthy of study considering that the usual trend is that, on average, Catalan beaches will lose one meter each year, according to the researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Blanes (CEAB), Rafael Sardà.
In 2006, the University of Girona (UdG) published a study in which it put numbers on the growth rate of this cove and estimated the maximum advance suffered by the coastline between 1956 and 2003 at 46 metres. the surface had practically doubled, going from 1 hectare occupied by the coves of Sa Riera and Playa del Rei, separated by a rock known by the natives as Sa Pirolta, to 1.73 hectares of surface area. A growth that accelerated especially from the end of 1977.
For many years now it is not the sea water that floods the property of Neus Pi but the sand. “I had to build a wall up to three meters high; there was so much sand that I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to open the door to the basement where we still keep fishing tools and which used to flood,” he explains.
The reasons for this continuous growth in the beach surface can be found in Pals beach, located further north. “Sa Riera is a cul-de-sac, a sediment trap; it receives the sand that comes from the dynamic coastline of the Pals beach, which finds no obstacles to settle on and it is easier for it to enter the bay of Sa Riera”, explains Sardà in an illustrative manner. The UdG study, directed by Anna Crous and Josep Pintó, indicates that the rocky promontory that separates the beaches of Pals and Sa Riera “is not very pronounced”, so that “it cannot act as a barrier” to the transport of sand, that in this area of ??the coast follows a north-south direction. In addition, this coastal sector receives a lot of sediment from the Ter and Daró rivers.
The Begur Councilor for the Environment and Beaches, geographer Jordi González, acknowledges that the case of Sa Riera is anecdotal but not unique. He explains that what is common is the marine regression motivated by the construction of infrastructures such as dikes, breakwaters or ports that push back the coastline. “Everything that is built in the coastal zone is a problem because it does not allow the beach to self-regenerate,” explains González, who also points out other factors that have not been scientifically proven that may have also contributed to the sand gain, such as the proximity of the Begur massif or the expansion of the l’Estartit marina that may have modified the currents.
The conclusion is that Sa Riera will continue to grow unabated unless the excess sand is periodically used to regenerate other beaches that suffer the opposite process, coastal regression.
