The Government of the Canary Islands will entrust the public company Gestur with the “renaturalization” study of Las Galletas beach, in the municipality of Arona, one of the 47 points of the Archipelago considered to be at high risk due to the rise in sea level in the coming years. years due to global warming.
The intention of the regional Executive, which will assume the powers in matters of Coasts in 2023, is to develop a project of “high value of ecological preservation”, as this newspaper learned. For this, the beach will be returned to its previous state, wider than at present, raising the level of the access road to Las Galletas above its current location, and a new pedestrian promenade will be created.
This new configuration will make it possible to preserve the intertidal pools frequented by various migratory birds and to distance the circulation route from the action of the waves, which cause damage every year. It must be remembered that in August 2021, the high tide caused the partial collapse of the promenade, forcing the traffic of one of the lanes in the Las Galletas-El Fraile direction to be cut off for several weeks.
The mayor of Arona, José Julián Mena, the Deputy Minister for the Fight against Climate Change and Ecological Transition, Miguel Ángel Pérez, and the Councilor for the Environment area, Leopoldo Díaz Oda, visited the area this week, accompanied by several technicians, to study on the ground the solutions that an “environmentally responsible project with global warming and sea level rise” will provide, they underlined.
“This plan will be a paradigm in coastal recovery projects, since it will allow us to expand the beach to return it to its original state, solve the damage caused by the rise in sea level and preserve the puddles and the environmental value, generating a new maritime pedestrian promenade”, highlighted Mena during the visit.
Last May, the Minister for Ecological Transition of the Government of the Canary Islands, José Antonio Valbuena, presented the PIMA Adapta plan, which outlines the scenarios that are expected in the Archipelago as a result of climate change and in which up to 47 points, a dozen of them in Tenerife, with stretches of coast of “high accumulated risk” due to the rise in sea level.
