Morphodynamic Environments of the Costa del Sol, Spain

The morphodynamic environments of the Costa del Sol, in southern Spain, have never been investigated at a littoral cell scale. In the last half of the 20th century the tourism industry have transformed the coastal landscapes and, importantly, the natural processes inducing irreversible damages and changes. Using an integrated modelling approach, which combines wave energy propagation and digital terrain integration (land and sea), in this article, a new characterisation of coastal morphodynamics for western Costa del Sol is presented. Results show that at littoral cell scale, even in the presence of the steep nearshore the adaptation of the system tends towards generating dissipative environments, the presence of abrupt changes in local bathymetry affects significantly wave orbital velocities even at depths beyond wave base potentially inducing nearshore sediment transport, and high energy events affect the coastal stretch in complex ways, where highly active short-crested/high-frequency wave conditions induce transitional morphodynamic states.