1957
Barcelona · 29 aerial surveys, 1946–2025
Barcelona's beaches: where the sea was in 1957, and where it is now
On the 1957 aerial photo, the sea at Poblenou came right up to the railway embankment. Today the water's edge at Mar Bella is 270 metres further out. At Barceloneta it is almost exactly where it was. Between Barceloneta and Mar Bella lie beaches the city built, and every year the sea takes back part of their sand.
Scroll: the photos change under the text.
Barceloneta already had a beach#
The photos underneath were taken from a plane in 1957. The red line is the water's edge on these photos; the blue line is the water's edge in June 2025. Along Sant Miquel and Barceloneta, on 39 of the 42 measuring lines the two are within 20 metres of each other, and across Barceloneta the typical gap is a metre or two, well within the ±10 m margin of error of the old photos.
This photo disproves the idea that Barcelona had no beaches before the Olympic Games. The beach was here. Further north, on the sand between Barceloneta and Poblenou, stood the Somorrostro, a shanty town of about 600 shacks and more than 1,500 people when it was demolished in 1966.
At Poblenou the sea reached the railway#
Head north-east. On the 1957 photos there is no beach here: the water came up to the stones of the coastal railway's embankment, with the factories behind it. (The 1946 flight still shows a narrow strip of sand.)
Today the water's edge is 202 metres further out at Bogatell and 270 metres at Mar Bella. From Bogatell to Llevant, even the promenade behind the beaches lies where the 1957 photos show water.
1986–1992: rubble, drains and a new coast#
By 1986 the railway was still there, and in front of it lay a wide band of sand and rubble. The engineers of Spain's coastal authority who rebuilt this shore later called it one of the most degraded stretches of the Spanish coast, a place “where everybody could get rid of everything”.
The works finished just before the Games in July 1992. Groynes were already there, built to carry the city's sewers out to sea; they were rebuilt during the works, and 1,485,476 cubic metres of sand were pumped onto the new beaches, from Somorrostro to Mar Bella. The March 1990 flight shows them half built.
Sand held between groynes#
The solution, in the engineers' words, was to “build pocket beaches between every couple of groins”. Each bay was designed to follow the shape that a beach sheltered by a headland takes on naturally. The April 1993 flight is the first to show the finished coastline.
Sand does not stay put. Waves move it along the shore, and the engineers' own surveys after the works already showed most of the bays apparently turning slightly towards the south. The groynes slow that movement; they do not stop it.
Across the nine beaches, the sand added in 2010 was gone within about a decade#
In 2010 the Spanish government added up to 750,000 cubic metres of sand to six of the city's beaches. The photos show it: Bogatell grew from 52 m wide in 2009 to 97 m in 2011, Nova Mar Bella from 82 m to 127 m.
Across all nine beaches, the total area of sand measured on the photos rose from 252,000 m² in 2009 to 349,000 m² in October 2010. By 2018 it was back close to the 2009 figure, in 2021 it was down to 234,000 m², and from 2022 to 2024 it stayed around the 2009 level.
The city council puts the loss at 30,000 cubic metres of sand a year. The Institute of Marine Sciences has monitored these beaches with video cameras for 20 years. In 2024, Gonzalo Simarro, an engineer at the institute, said that Bogatell had lost 20 metres of width on average in 14 years. The photos show 27 m lost from 2011 to July 2024 (33 m from the October 2010 peak), a greater loss than Simarro reported.
Area of sand, all beaches (m²) What the latest sand deliveries changed#
In the months after the January 2025 announcement, 40,000 cubic metres of sand dug out for a car park by the old fish market were taken to Sant Sebastià. The beach was 40 m wide in July 2024 and 51 m in June 2025.
By May 2024: 23,000 cubic metres brought from El Masnou to Nova Mar Bella after the November storms. The beach was 79 m wide in September 2023 and 90 m in July 2024.
From late May 2024, sand dredged at the mouth of the Port Olímpic (17,000 cubic metres in all) went to Sant Sebastià, Barceloneta and Nova Icària. On the July 2024 photos none of the three is clearly wider than in September 2023, before the November storms.
Every beach, flight by flight#
Tap a beach on the strip or choose it below. The strip is the coast unrolled into a straight line, from Sant Sebastià on the left to Llevant on the right; the city is at the top, the sea at the bottom.
Aerial photos: Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya (ICGC), flights 1946–2025; coast unrolled into a straight line.
| Beach | Width 2025 | Compared with 1957 |
|---|---|---|
| Sant Sebastià beach | 51 m | The water's edge is 14 m further out than in 1957. |
| Sant Miquel beach | 62 m | The water's edge is 14 m further inland than in 1957. |
| Barceloneta beach | 45 m | The water's edge is close to where it was in 1957 (±10 m). |
| Somorrostro beach | 59 m | The water's edge is close to where it was in 1957 (±10 m). |
| Nova Icària beach | 92 m | The water's edge is 118 m further out than in 1957. |
| Bogatell beach | 74 m | The water's edge is 202 m further out than in 1957. |
| Mar Bella beach | 53 m | The water's edge is 270 m further out than in 1957. |
| Nova Mar Bella beach | 85 m | The water's edge is 169 m further out than in 1957. |
| Llevant beach | 72 m | The water's edge is 154 m further out than in 1957. |
How this was measured#
The photos are the orthophotos of the Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya (ICGC): 29 flights between 1946 and 2025 that cover the city's coastline (the 1994 one only part of it). Along the 5.7 km of coast from Sant Sebastià to Llevant, 286 lines were drawn at right angles to the shore, one every 20 metres, starting from a fixed line traced along the seafront road.
On each line, in each flight, the water's edge is the point where a continuous area of seawater begins. It was read automatically from the colour of the pixels and checked by eye on overlays of the photos; next to groynes and breakwaters, where a structure interrupts the water, lines with impossible values were removed. The width of a beach is the distance from the water's edge to the landward edge of the dry sand, which is fixed for each line: the median of its positions on the 2008–2025 flights (2016 left out). The width given for a beach is the median of the widths measured on its lines; a beach's area is that width times its length.
The flights took place in different months and in different sea conditions. Between two consecutive summer flights with no sand added, a beach's width changes by 3 m or more about half the time: differences of a few metres mean little. The old photos line up with the 2025 one to within a few metres on the streets of the Eixample and the Ciutadella park; for 1946 and 1957, allow a margin of ±10 m.
Excluded from the width calculations: March 1990 (the works were under way), 2000 (joins between photos running across the beach), November 2016 (waves on the beach on the day of the flight) and, at Sant Sebastià and Sant Miquel, 2004 (murky shallow water misread as sea). Measurements start in 1993 for most beaches; at Nova Mar Bella in 2006 and at Llevant in 2008, after the works behind them, visible on the 2003–2006 photos, had finished. For the 1956–1957 flight, the ICGC dates the photos to 1957.
Where the measurements stop#
A photo shows area, not volume: the sand under the water, which holds the beach up, cannot be seen, so the cubic metres on this page are the ones announced by the authorities, not measured here. The Port Olímpic and the Fòrum area are not beaches and were left out. On the 1946 flight, the surf at Barceloneta makes the water's edge hard to read; the comparison with the past uses the 1957 flight.
Sources#
- ICGC, orthophotos of Catalonia 1946–2025 (orto-territorial WMS service), with flight dates. icgc.cat
- Peña, C. and Covarsí, M., Project, works and monitoring at Barcelona Olympic beaches, Coastal Engineering 1994, ch. 257: the shore before, the groynes, 1,485,476 m³ of sand. icce-ojs-tamu.tdl.org
- Catalan News, 21 May 2024: 23,000 m³ at Nova Mar Bella; the 2010 top-up, up to 750,000 m³ on six beaches. catalannews.com
- Barcelona City Council, 22 January 2025: 40,000 m³ to Sant Sebastià, 8,000 m³ to Llevant and Mar Bella; the beaches lose 30,000 m³ a year. ajuntament.barcelona.cat
- BSM, 29 May 2024: 17,000 m³ dredged at the Port Olímpic mouth, for Sant Sebastià, Barceloneta and Nova Icària. bsmsa.cat
- Catalan News, 3 April 2024: Gonzalo Simarro (Institute of Marine Sciences) on Bogatell, 20 m lost in 14 years. catalannews.com
- Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana, “el Somorrostro”: the shacks, the residents, the 1966 demolition. enciclopedia.cat