Coastal municipalities monitor their beaches to measure the environmental impact of tourism

The Spanish tourism sector is preparing for a record summer in which they hope to emulate the summer periods prior to the coronavirus pandemic.

The government has already advanced that 90% of the foreign tourism that visited the country in 2019 will be recovered.

That year, 84 million foreigners were received, a figure that is expected to be reached this year, taking advantage of the high temperatures and the national tourist offer.

For this reason, the administrations of the main tourist centers are being reinforced with the necessary technology to control capacity in order to improve the performance of public services and minimize the environmental impact.

Pandora FMS helps to monitor and manage our beaches

More and more municipalities are opting for the installation of monitoring systems that collect all the data in real time and allow them to be managed from a main console.

Monitoring, present in most companies to improve the management of their IT infrastructure, captures all the data that is constantly generated and manages it from this central system.

In this way, access to all the information collected is much simpler and immediate and the capacity to react to any anomaly detected is improved.

The importance of monitoring in companies has spurred the administration’s interest in improving the efficiency of their services and they are now applying this technology in the management of their beaches.

Municipalities in busy tourist areas are particularly interested in knowing the state of the busiest spots and are focusing on beaches, where systems are already being implemented to monitor the state of each sandy area and control the capacity.

Thus, in addition to measuring how many tourists visit a place in a given time slot, it is possible to minimize the environmental impact on the territory by establishing precise measures to improve the environmental protection of the beaches as well as the fauna and flora that inhabit them.

“Monitoring is a reality that is present in the private sector, and increasingly established in the public sector, which improves the control of tourist spots with large crowds of people.

With these systems it is possible to calculate how many people are on each beach at any given time.

In this way, the efficiency of health and safety services can be improved or the capacity of some of these areas can simply be restricted if the environmental damage being caused is alarming,

explains Sancho Lerena, CEO of the Spanish company Pandora FMS, which monitors systems of giants such as Rakuten or Toshiba, as well as public administrations such as Madrid Digital or hospitals.

Where can we find these monitoring systems?

These monitoring systems are being installed in various parts of the country.

For example, the Coastal Observation and Forecasting System of the Balearic Islands will be installed on the beaches of Mallorca.

With this mechanism, the administration will allow tourists to share photographs taken from the same point on the beach, allowing them to see the evolution of the landscape in order to control its pollution and to record the hourly capacity of the beach.

This same experiment based on monitoring will also be present in Galicia, specifically in Vigo, or on beaches in Valencia.

The two main objectives in all cases are to control the environmental impact and to know the approximate capacity of each beach in different time slots in order to manage public services in the most efficient way.

Gran Canaria has also invested 500,000 euros in a system to monitor very busy beaches such as Las Canteras, Alcaravanera and La Baja.

For its part, Barcelona will use drones, after investing almost 170,000 euros, to measure the capacity of each beach without the need to identify the population.

In both situations, monitoring will be essential to collect all the data and enable the authorities to act as appropriate.

“Monitoring processes are in our day-to-day life, it is normal for administrations and tourism companies to adhere to this type of systems,” acknowledges the CEO of Pandora FMS.

“Monitoring allows access to information by a single means .

In this case, a computer where all the data generated every second is concentrated and which, if the monitoring system did not exist, would have to be collected from each specific console.

Thus, if there is an alert in an area, action can be taken from the central console and the other areas can be alerted,” says Lerena.

 

Tourist wave

The summer of 2022 was set to be the summer of the return to full normality, also in the economic sphere.

However, the outbreak of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent inflationary wave led to fears of a new crisis from May to the present.

Despite this, the Government has reaffirmed that the Spanish economy is “strong” and has positioned tourism as one of the driving forces in the coming months.

The forecasts of the Executive go through to recover nine out of ten foreign tourists who visited Spain in 2019, a year in which 84 million people were received in the 12 months of the fiscal year.

At the moment, more than 20 million airline seats are already estimated to be booked for these months.

In addition, domestic tourism is also likely to grow by 3%, so the economy will not only be driven by the foreign population.