Guardamar and La Mata Dunes

Summer holidays help us to discover various areas of great natural interest throughout our geography. This time we visited Guardamar and La Mata, in Torrevieja, where we were able to find dunes formed from the sand provided by the sea, forming a dune belt that covers the entire coastline of these municipalities, from north to south.

What strikes us, as foresters, is that this group, formerly mobile and threatening due to the action of the wind, was established through a great work of reforestation, which began in 1900 and which gave rise to the current coastal forest. The plantation used various plant species such as pine, carrasco or piñonero pine, cypress and eucalyptus, among other species, as part of a project launched at the end of the 19th century, so when on December 2, 1897, the Guardamar Dune Defense and Repopulation Project was approved by Royal Order, the first stone was laid in an innovative process for the time and with excellent results for the population of Guardamar, who saw the risk posed to them by the advancement of the dune system disappear.

The intense deforestation that took place from the 18th to the beginning of the 19th century in the Segura basin, together with the erosive processes of the river over the unprotected basin, caused a considerable increase in sediments that were later redistributed along the coast by the action of the sea. The force of the wind put the icing on this bitter cake, moving these sediments inward and thus influencing the configuration of the pre-existing dune system. The combination of these factors resulted in a clear threat to the town of Guardamar, who observed how the dunes were advancing at a rate of between 2 and 8 meters per year. To fix these dunes, a reforestation was carried out led by the forest engineer Francisco Mira y Botella, with which it was possible to stop the advance of the dunes and prevent the burial of the town.

Forest engineer Francisco Mira y Botella

The repopulation, which began in the year 1900 and ended in the 1930s, has given rise to the current consolidated forest mass next to the sea, known as “the pine forest”. It houses a nursery and several forest buildings of the time.

The more than 600,000 trees that were planted over four decades not only achieved the desired objective but also created a landscape environment of extraordinary ecological, tourist and cultural appeal.