Application of Geomatic Techniques for the Assessment of Anthropogenic Changes in the Urban Beaches of “La Magdalena” (Santander, Spain)

Abstract

Since the 1970s, dredging sands have been poured onto the embayed beaches of La Magdalena in the western mouth of the estuarine Bay of Santander (N Spain) in order to increase beach width. Up until the year 2000, the sands were systematically fed by a trailing suction dredge, which was later replaced by truck sand transfers from the surplus sands of the western beach to the eastern ones and by mechanical redistribution to create artificial berms. A recent project aimed to solve sand losses after each storm by building two perpendicular breakwaters about 620 m apart. The eastern breakwater was built in the early summer of 2018, and wave storms in November 2018, February 2019, October 2020 and the last days of 2021 progressively dismantled the reconstructed upper beach areas and eroded other segments. The western breakwater, however, designed to retain the E–W sandy beach drift, was never built. Four photogrammetric restitutions from 2005, 2010, 2014 and 2017 and an aerial LiDAR in 2012 were obtained to better understand the previous topographic distribution of the back and foreshore. Numerous field observations were made, and six field surveys have been performed since 2018 using laser TLS and GNSS, which occurred in November 2018, March 2019, October 2019, March 2020, October 2020 and April 2021. The definitive results of the evolution of the sand loss are presented, a hypothesis is proposed to explain the dynamo-sedimentary trend, in which longitudinal transport dominates promoting the formation in the progress of a new sand beach, and some sustainable solutions are proposed. The results show that the constructive solution has failed to stabilize the beach and that the predictive models that justified it have not coincided with the real dynamic and sedimentary evolution.