Every storm takes its toll. The most common is to take the sand from the beaches to deposit it out to sea, on the outside of the docks of the marinas or in the mouths themselves. And this is the postcard of Sitges: beaches that shrink while the three marinas in the municipality have to request emergency dredging to remove sand and be able to guarantee the minimum draft for the safety of the boats that enter and leave. Faced with the refusal of the City Council, the ports dredge the sand and throw it back into the sea instead of using it to regenerate their damaged beaches.
The storms have put the marinas on the ropes. “If instead of ports we were talking about airports and there were stones on the landing strip, we would act quickly… however, sand accumulates for us, which poses a danger to the boats, and the administrative processing is extremely slow and complicated,” explains Juan Tubella, CEO of Port Ginesta, the largest marina on the Peninsula, with capacity for 1,200 boats. Tubella demands a simplified procedure to guarantee maritime safety and to be able to maintain the activity of the facilities with all the guarantees.
Since 2006, the port has been monitoring the behavior of the seabed, “and we have detected that the storms are increasingly behaving more erratic,” maintains Rodrigo de Febrer, captain of Port Ginesta. Designed to protect from wind and easterly seas, the increasingly frequent garbí storms have displaced sand accumulations into the mouths.
The Generalitat is the administration that has all powers over marinas, and the concession of these facilities includes an approved depth of 4.5 meters. “In the areas where we are better, we have a draft of three meters, and in the most critical areas, after the last storm it remained at one meter,” adds De Febrer. The sand accumulates in western areas “where we have detected up to 200,000 m3 of accumulated sand.” At the moment, they are waiting for permission to carry out emergency dredging and have yet to resolve a multi-year procedure to remove sand in a planned manner since 2012.
Between 2014 and 2018, the alliance with the ministry and the City Council made it possible to speed up the processing of dredging in the port, and the sand was used to regenerate the municipality’s beaches. However, the current City Council does not approve this procedure. For this reason, during the last few days, a 60-meter-long boat has been working in the neighboring Port Sitges-Aiguadolç, dredging sand from the port mouth to pour it back into the sea, a hundred meters from Balmins beach. The manager of Port de Sitges, Albert Bertran, states that “dredging is a necessity for our facilities”, but understands that “it would have been better if the City Council had moved to dump the sand on the beach instead of doing it in the sea. ”. He explains that now there is no room to change the permit for the discharge of sand from the mouth. Port Sitges spends close to 60,000 euros on this latest dredging.
The recent storm greatly worsened the situation on the beaches of this municipality. The mayor of Sitges, Aurora Carbonell (ERC), maintains that “the sand that is extracted as a result of dredging for ship safety reasons is deposited, once again, in a strategic point so that the dynamics of the coastline carry this sand to the beaches of Balmins and Sant Sebastià”.
The mayor also assures that “the objective is to contribute to the increase in sand in these two points by avoiding means that could damage the marine environment and that, on the other hand, left us with wet sands for a long time.” Be that as it may, Aurora Carbonell defends a storm-proof solution to stabilize beach sands. She does not want to make a public expense contributing to drainage, which does not last due to the maritime storms of the months of May and June. This position has the Sitges Hospitality Gremi and the municipal opposition up in arms. Mònica Gallardo (Junts) regrets the “inaction” of the local government during the last five years. She also regrets that a mandate from the municipal plenary session to stabilize the beaches has not been fulfilled. Gallardo assures that the issue “is about saving Sitges.”
Some beaches have naturally recovered part of the sand lost in recent days, in several they have not yet been able to place, due to lack of space, neither beach bars nor hammocks and others had practically disappeared before, such as Bassa Rodona. Sant Sebastià has been the sandy area hardest hit by Storm Nelson. It has been reduced to a minimum, although the fences that prevented going down to the beach in most of its accesses have already been removed.
