For almost a century, the beach-houses of Guardamar del Segura have held out against time and tide, change and development, offering a living snapshot of the early stirrings of tourism on Spain’s Costa Blanca.
For decades, families from inland areas of Alicante province have come to the modest dwellings on Babilonia beach to spend the summer months together, eating, drinking, swimming and chatting. Enduring friendships and relationships have begun on their verandas and under their roofs.
However, barring a last-minute reprieve, 60 of the houses will be torn down in the middle of September after lengthy legal efforts to extend their land grants failed and their existence was blamed for worsening coastal erosion.
The houses, made originally from wood and then from more durable materials, sprang up between the 1930s and 50s after decades of work to stop the sand dunes advancing towards the town of Guardamar del Segura. The authorities welcomed their construction, hoping that they would help serve as a barrier to the dunes. Before long, a summer neighbourhood evolved as families secured long-term land grants and built beach homes to which they returned annually. A few people live there all year round.
“This has created a tight-knit community, now in its fifth generation,” said Víctor Sánchez, one of those battling to save the houses. “My best friend lives next door, his mother was friends with my uncle, his grandmother with my grandmother, and his six nieces are now building new friendships with my cousin’s three daughters.”
Sánchez, who now lives in Essex, cherishes the annual trip back to Babilonia to catch up with friends and family. He said that unlike other parts of the Costa Blanca, such as Benidorm, the beach has not changed much since the long-gone summers when his mother and uncle used to travel there in a donkey-drawn cart.
Many of its houses still look the way they did in the 1930s, complete with patios once intended for chicken coops, although the decor in his parents’ house, including the orange-tiled kitchen, dates from the 1970s.
“I think if you talk about Mediterranean Spain, then everybody thinks about Benidorm and about high rises very close to the sea,” added Sánchez. “Lots of people on the beaches; everything’s packed. People from abroad or from Madrid and faraway towns. That’s the image. It is what it is. But it wasn’t like that here.”
His memories are of small children heading out for morning swims, teenagers getting up later after long nights out, old men playing dominoes and neighbours stopping by to chat.
But the idyll’s days are numbered. Legal efforts to extend the land grants – which ended in 2018 – have failed and Spanish courts have set the demolition date for 15 September.
Spain’s environment ministry says the houses are built on one of the most valuable dune areas of the Mediterranean coastline, adding that their construction has disrupted sedimentary flows and caused serious erosion.
“Even small storms affect the beach, making it increasingly difficult for the beach to recover its natural profile since the very existence of these buildings prevents the sea from accessing the sand reservoir in the enormous dune field located behind the buildings,” the ministry said in a statement. “This means that the beach cannot adopt a defensive profile against storms, leaving it completely unprotected from the waves.”
It also notes that some owners have altered the beach by trying to shore up the area outside their houses with piles of stones.
Sánchez and other members of the Playa Babilonia residents’ association, who blame the erosion on the construction of a nearby breakwater in the mid-1990s, are pinning their hopes on a new coastal law drawn up by the regional government that offers special protection to seaside heritage sites.
As the Valencian government’s environment minister has said, one of the aims of the law is “precisely to conserve the elements on our coast that deserve to be conserved – and areas of ethnological importance are one of the things we want to protect”.
But the new legislation, as well as efforts to secure protected national heritage status for Playa Babilonia, may have come too late.
If the houses are demolished next month, Sánchez and his neighbours fear the loss of more than just an important part of their lives and pasts.
“The houses here don’t look like those in the rest of the Mediterranean,” he said. “They have different porches and pillars and they’re something you don’t see in other places. There, it’s all chalets with swimming pools and tennis courts that have given way to pádel courts. There’s no heart in any of that.”
