Many modern beaches can no longer be seen in terms of the natural categories outlined in the chapters of this book; urbanization has created a new category of shoreline, sometimes beachless, sometimes characterized by a faux beach. Urbanized beaches are the product of a historical pattern, or evolution, from subsistence beaches to resorts to complete urbanization.
People originally used beaches as places to hunt birds, fish, or launch boats (i.e., for fowling, fishing and navigation). In warm climates, people certainly cooled off along beaches, but the most common record we find of the ancient human occupation of beaches is in shell middens. Middens are prehistoric garbage dumps, usually composed of discarded shells from the shellfish that inhabited adjacent tidal flats and marshes. People had little impact on beaches in prehistoric times.
Swimming and bathing were generally not practiced by Christians in the European Middle Ages in part because of the association of those practices with Roman decadence and in part because of theories that immersion made the body susceptible to disease. Northern Europeans maintained only a practical use for beaches until the 1700s, when the Grand Tour brought wealthy, educated people to the Mediterranean (e.g., the French Riviera and the Italian coast) and elsewhere, where they observed beautiful and sometimes desolate beaches. Painters created romantic images of exotic beaches as well as of rural beaches with local fishermen. The wealthy traveler sketched beach scenes and wrote lyrical prose about the wonders of the seashore. By the mid-eighteenth century, the British popularized bathing in the sea more as a health measure than a recreational matter, and seaside spas grew in scale and number. These were designed for the wealthy, and sea bathing was accompanied by walks along the strand and fine dining during the summer season. The beaches at Brighton, Margate, and Scarborough, England, drew large numbers of visitors in the mid-to-late eighteenth century and were among the first seaside resorts. In France as well, fishing villages in Biarritz and the Riviera became transformed into resorts for the wealthy, and other resorts sprung up around Europe’s coastline. Seaside resorts were made widely popular by poets, impressionist painters, and later, photographers of the nineteenth century. Rail and ferry services grew to efficiently bring larger numbers of tourists to the developing seashores, and hotels and restaurants replaced the fishing villages. Boardwalks separated the grand hotels from what remained of sand dunes. Following storms, little by little, seawalls were built on the outer edge of the boardwalks to protect property. Many coastal cities are now fronted by massive esplanades—the combined concrete and stone seawalls, promenades, and avenues. Horse-racing and gambling establishments were built to entertain the crowds, who no longer came to the beach for their health.
Upper left Bagdad Beach, Mexico, is an example of a low-cost beach resort, sited at the high-tide line of a very flat beach, which is migrating under the buildings. This beach is immediately south of the U.S.-Mexican border on the Gulf of Mexico and is used mainly by Mexican citizens.
Upper right Everybody enjoys the beach, but in a variety of different ways. Here the ladies’ circle is engaged in a competitive card game, next to a seawall in Cadiz, Spain.
Center left A mobile refreshment stand on Noosa Beach, Australia, provides an example of how to make sure that the concessions are where the people are on a given day at the beach. The need for permanent buildings at the back of this eroding shoreline (note the scarp in the background) is eliminated.
Center right Typical beach chairs for hire on the beach at Egmond, Netherlands, provide shelter from cool breezes (and perhaps blowing sand) while the occupants enjoy the summer sun.
Lower left A draft-horse—drawn wagon carrying tourists around on Texel Island, Netherlands.
Lower right This tram incline in Bournemouth, England, provides an unusual type of beach access for beach users to get past the steep cliff.
Beach resorts in the United States began in Cape May, New Jersey, and spread northward up the coast toward New York City. American resorts were patterned after later-model European resorts and were intended more for the masses who came by train than for the wealthy. There were four hundred hotels in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by 1900, and brothels, drinking establishments, piers that extended out into the surf, and other nonbeach forms of entertainment dominated coastal resorts. At about this time, the first large amusement park, including a Ferris wheel, was established at Coney Island, New York (a barrier island).
After World War I, the French and Italian rivieras grew as major resorts for the sunbathing wealthy of Europe. In the United States, Florida was discovered and rapidly developed. Palm Beach, Florida, served the very wealthy, and Miami Beach appealed to the middle classes seeking sun and sand. World War II brought soldiers to the beaches of Europe and the Pacific, and the graveyards, monuments, and fortification ruins still attest to the world’s brutal use of beaches in the 1940s.
This hotel in Waikiki has lost most of its beach in front of its seawall. In order to provide a “beach” for its customers, the hotel has constructed a concrete box and filled it with sand that is connected to the beach. Some people called it the “sandbox,” a sad commentary on the state of beaches along heavily developed shorelines. Photo courtesy of Norma Longo.
This rock revetment along the shoreline of Kalama Park on Maui, Hawaii, prevents erosion, but at the cost of the beach. Sand may have been taken from this shoreline, which created the problem, but if erosion had been allowed to continue, a new beach would have formed. Photo courtesy of Norma Longo.
Closely spaced lounge chairs facing the beach at Cannes, France, one of the world’s premier beach resorts, reflect the end result of recreational beaches narrowing between the sea and the esplanade seawall. Space per person is limited, and the beach is no longer the open expanse that many associate with beaches. Yet, its appeal as a social gathering place remains for many.
After World War II, the recreational development of coastlines took on modern appearances. Air travel put all the world’s beaches within reach of those who could afford to fly, and cars brought the rest to the coast. Trailers and growing numbers of second homes created a beach lifestyle that many desired. Air-conditioning transformed the indoors of tropical resorts into tolerable climates, while the outside remained sunny and hot. By the 1960s, beaches had become a middle-class cultural focus for young people in the United States. Beaches were now for showing off fast cars, surfing, and weight lifting, and films and music attempted to document this new lifestyle.
Every coastal resort has a different story, a different beginning. Australia’s Gold Coast was a lightly settled area beginning in the mid-1800s, but with the construction of the Surfers Paradise Hotel in 1925 the tourist rush began. In the 1970s, developers began to rule the roost, and construction of high-rise buildings began. Air service to the region began in 1981.
Post–World War II resort development increased in many of the locales that servicemen and women discovered in their travels during the war. Florida and California in the United States, southern Europe, and notably the Hawaiian Islands are good examples.
In the 1950s, Spain’s Costa Brava region of northeastern Catalonia was designated by the Franco government as a holiday destination. Thus began the rush to the sea, and tourism quickly replaced fishing as the principal local industry. It began as a package holiday destination for tourists from France and the United Kingdom and gradually broadened its appeal to a wide variety of vacationers. The history of Portugal’s Algarve coast is similar; it remains a popular destination for northern Europeans.
The Côte d’Azur, or French Riviera, was one of the first modern beach resorts, beginning in the late eighteenth century as a health resort for wealthy British and quickly evolving into a favorite beach resort for the aristocracy and wealthy of all of Europe. Before World War II, it was a gathering spot for the wealthy of many nationalities and for artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso, Edith Wharton, and Aldous Huxley. After the war, it remained a popular tourist destination, but no longer just for the upper class.
Only three people lived on the Isla Cancún in 1970 when the Banco de Mexico began hotel construction on Cancún Beach. Construction followed a lengthy period of research to find the best location for Mexico’s newest and some say greatest beach resort. Today there are 150 hotels with 24,000 rooms and 380 restaurants in the resort development, and the popularity has led to extending the development along the coast to the south, the Mayan Riviera.
All good things end, however, and resorts come and go, in and out of fashion as the crowds of early visitors transform the natural attractions of the seaside into an artificial, crowded, polluted landscape often beset with crime. The stages in the life and death of a beach resort are directly related to the number of tourists a location draws. When a future resort was first discovered, it was often a fishing community (e.g., the coastal resorts of Portugal and Spain). Visitors came and local people adapted to accommodate the visitors by opening bed-and-breakfasts, operating boat rides to barrier islands, or taking the more adventurous on fishing expeditions. Rarely can one find a truly undiscovered beach today, although they exist in some remote parts of South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, some islands, and around the Arctic and Antarctic. Over time, more visitors came and hotels were built near entrance points, at first near rail connections in Europe or along new beachfront roads in the United States. Once development took off, all locations along the seaside were built upon. No longer were local people needed; the money and staff to run the resorts came from distant cities, and the profits flowed back there. To protect the investments from natural shoreline-change processes, such as storms, seawalls and groins were erected. These also had the undesired effect of causing beach loss, but visitors now came for more than the shore. Gambling and other adult-oriented activities replaced seaside bathing and family recreation. The numbers of visitors inevitably declined as the beach resort became seedy and natural disasters more difficult to survive. Last Island (Isle Dernière), Louisiana had a hotel with a thousand rooms in 1856, but it was so devastated by a hurricane and associated loss of life that it was never rebuilt. Water was polluted by inadequate sewage treatment and fish disappeared. In this stage of stagnation and decline, a beach resort lacks the means to deal with storms and fires, so large areas of old resorts were often abandoned.
Is this the view of the future? A child sits alone where once a dune stood, and still her beach is being removed—not by nature’s waves and wind but by development’s thirst for sand. Photo courtesy of Lana Wong.
A view of Honolulu and Waikiki Beach, one of the world’s great beach resorts. The actual beach here is very narrow and exists only through repeated artificial nourishment. Note the small pink building on the shore in the middle of the row of high-rise buildings. This was the original “large” hotel on the shoreline, the “seed” that led to this field of tourist hotels. The future of Waikiki and other beaches like it will depend heavily on the rate of future sea-level rise and the ability to find an affordable sand supply for continued nourishment. Certainly by the end of the twenty-first century, with the expected minimum sea-level rise of 3 ft (almost 1 m), the cost of beach nourishment to maintain this primary tourist attraction will be extremely high. Photo courtesy of Norma Longo.
Many resorts came back after storms or fires eliminated much of the unsightly development. The new development, although sometimes more in harmony with nature, often was touted as “bigger and better,” which meant more valuable property at greater risk. Sometimes casino gambling led to beach-resort rejuvenation, as at Atlantic City, New Jersey; at other times beach replenishment made the seaside attractive again, as at Miami Beach, Florida. Thus, most of the developed world’s beaches present an appearance today that is very different from that of the past. The oldest resorts, like Cape May, New Jersey, and Brighton, England, have lost much of their original appeal (and their beaches as well) as erosion and neglect have haunted them.
Some attractive beaches avoid the resort model of development and remain attractive. These are found in national parks and seashores, where management generally means letting natural processes, including erosion, happen. On the beaches of Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, for example, “The Outermost House” of literary fame was allowed to succumb to the sea, as were the signal towers of Marconi’s original wireless radio device. When a storm eroded a bathhouse and parking lot, the rubble became buried under a modern sand dune, and nothing was rebuilt. Exceptionally valuable property, like Highland Light, established by George Washington, was moved to prevent its destruction. In these locations, the number of visitors is sustained at relatively high levels for a long time even as parkland is lost.
Some wealthy residential complexes are also relatively natural. The cost of land has limited development, and in some instances prudent placement of properties back from the beach has minimized the need for shoreline armoring. Despite the best intentions of maintaining a beach as a developed paradise, in places like North Topsail Beach, North Carolina, loss of developed beach properties is causing residents to consider engineering their shoreline.
Beach resorts for future generations will be different from today’s beach playgrounds. The anticipated sea-level rise by 2100 will make maintenance of beaches through the process of placing sand on the beach untenable. Many beach resorts two generations from now will likely be heavily seawalled and beachless. Older beach resorts will follow the example of Cape May, New Jersey, where the principal activity will be promenading on top of a seawall on a beachless shoreline, watching the waves break and taking the sea air. Developers will seek unspoiled areas where beach retreat has been unfettered by buildings and will repeat the same history as for past resorts. Only in parks and national seashores will natural beaches remain to be enjoyed, as the most dynamic systems on Earth continue to move landward.
