Beaches pressures analysis as a tool for tourism planning: the case of Mallorca

Abstract

[eng] Mallorca is one of the top Europe´s sun and beach destination attracting millions of tourists every year. This was found to bring challenges to the island due it´s limited resources over tourism have been discussed as problem in the island over recent year, before pandemic. Because of this, also due to lack of attempts to study the effects it brings to beaches of Mallorca this research was conducted. Main objective being to construct a model using GIS to measure the anthropic pressures beaches in the island are under. In total 171 beaches were included in the research. The model was constructed using 7 factors: pressure generated by proximity to urban nucleus, tourist accommodation pressures based on proximity, accessibility of the beach, beach level of artificial surrounding, capacity of the beach based on size, potential activities to be developed on the beach based on its geomorphology, potential of the beach activities based on swimming conditions. All the factors were obtained from various data bases, normalized, weighted and included in the model of Anthropic Pressures Indicator. With API we found pressures among beaches to be very unevenly distributed, and more than half of beaches being under more than moderate pressure in the tourism season. Further development of this model is proposed by including sensitivity of a beach and response of a management indicators. With this study we concentrated on anthropic pressure, inclusion of mentioned two additional indicators could significantly improve the accuracy of results and be extremely useful for further coastline management strategies, to make them best suited for every beach