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Date Published: 07/07/2026

The race to save Cádiz's beaches before the tourists arrive is becoming harder to win every year

Millions of euros and hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of sand have been pumped onto the Costa de la Luz coastline this summer, but the sea keeps taking it back

Every summer, the same scene plays out along the Cádiz coast. Diggers, dredges and lorries work against the clock to restore beaches battered by months of winter storms, shaping the sand back into something presentable just hours before the umbrellas go up. It has become a fixture of the seasonal calendar, and each year the scale of the effort grows a little larger.

This summer, the central government approved €6.2 million in emergency funding to regenerate sand and repair damaged infrastructure at beaches across the province. The works, coordinated by the Coastal Authority for Andalusia-Atlantic and triggered by an exceptional emergency procedure activated on March 2, have covered eleven municipalities: Cádiz, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Chipiona, Rota, El Puerto de Santa María, San Fernando, Chiclana, Conil, Vejer, Barbate and Tarifa.

Some individual cases stand out for their scale. Camposoto beach in San Fernando received the most significant intervention in the entire province, with nearly 179,000 cubic metres of sand at a cost of more than €1.8 million. The local island council described a situation that had been "causing enormous concern due to the disappearance of significant areas of sand, damage to the pipes, the loss of infrastructure and the difficulties in guaranteeing the usual services of the summer season."

Las Redes-Santa Catalina in El Puerto de Santa María received 88,000 cubic metres at a cost of €605,000. El Palmar in Vejer got 60,000 cubic metres for €475,000. La Barrosa in Chiclana, one of the Costa de la Luz's most popular beaches, received more than 45,000 cubic metres. Santa María del Mar in Cádiz city had machinery on the beach until the very end of June, adding 30,000 cubic metres of sand with cranes still being withdrawn as the first beach umbrellas were going up.

Rota's Punta Candor was so badly hit that virtually all beach access points had to be rebuilt, delaying the installation of showers and walkways well into the season.

Tarifa tells a different kind of story. At Punta Paloma, near the famous shifting dunes of Valdevaqueros, machinery works almost constantly to clear sand from the only road serving around sixty homes.

Residents say they have been dealing with the same problem for more than two decades. When the easterly wind blows hard, the road gets buried. The machinery clears it. The wind blows again.

The Cádiz coastline is one of the most spectacular in Spain. It is also one of the most fragile, and the gap between those two facts is widening every winter.

Image: Emilio Sánchez Hernández/Pexels

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