The sea sparkles and laps against the shore of the Maresme coast, north of Barcelona, as the train runs alongside it, passing the few hopeful spring sunbathers and surfers. At points, Spain’s oldest train line runs so close to the shore it feels as if you’re travelling on the sea itself.
Last Sunday, that could well have happened. Heavy waves took a giant bite out of the coast, threatening a section of the track with collapse and forcing the train company to lay on a bus service between La Pineda and Malgrat de Mar.
It wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last: coastal erosion and rising sea levels have put the future of the famed Maresme line in jeopardy. In January 2020, storm Gloria battered the line with 3.6-metre (12ft) waves, causing widespread damage and putting several sections out of action. Adif, the company responsible for railway infrastructure, spent €12m (£10m) repairing and shoring up a 1.4-mile (2.2km) stretch of track and replacing a bridge. Smaller beaches were washed away entirely, removing even the thin buffer between trains and waves.
“One more Gloria and that will be the end of the train line,” says Antoni Esteban of Preservem el Maresme, an umbrella organisation representing 115 community, conservation and other groups in the region.
Opened in 1848, the Maresme line links Barcelona with Blanes, 70km away, at the edge of the Costa Brava. The service was conceived to transport the Barcelona bourgeoisie to their summer residences.
Since the 1970s, the Maresme population has grown exponentially. The train now passes through 16 growing towns with a combined population of about 500,000. There are 37 beaches and five marinas along the way. On working days, about 100,000 people use the service, and in summer the trains are packed as people from Barcelona head for the beaches.
However, rapid urbanisation of the Maresme towns has worsened coastal erosion. Human activity and canalisation of the rivers that drain into the sea mean less sediment is deposited, leading to greater erosion, says Joan Manuel Vilaplana, a geologist at the Observatori del GeoRisc research institute.
The five marinas along the coast are also a contributing factor, Vilaplana says: “Ocean currents move the sand from north to south as part of a natural process of regenerating the beaches, but the marinas’ quays act as sedimentary traps.”
A €50m plan to install 28 breakwaters, each 150 metres long, on the coastline may only make the problem worse. And, despite being agreed in 2015 by Adif and central, regional and local governments, it seems unlikely to be set in motion.
Critics point out that in Barcelona, where a series of breakwaters was built to reduce erosion, less sand is reaching the beaches than ever.
“Hard solutions such as breakwaters and sea walls simply aggravate the problem of erosion, so the cure is worse than the disease,” says Vilaplana.
Pilar Marcos of Greenpeace agrees: “Building breakwaters is a huge outlay of public money that will solve nothing in the long term as storms get stronger and more frequent. It’s just a sticking plaster.”
Not only are the storms worsening, rising sea levels mean the waves penetrate further inland. “Over the past 30 years, the sea level on the Catalan coast has been rising by 3.3mm a year,” says Vilaplana. “We have to rethink what we’re doing. Nature is doing its work, and climate change is causing it to accelerate.”
Marcos says that local fishers complain about the impact on marine life of constantly dredging the seabed for sand to replenish the beaches after each winter’s storms.
Joan Campolier, the mayor of Santa Susanna, which lies midway between Pineda de Mar and Malgrat de Mar, has called for a definitive solution, even if it means closing the line for longer. His counterpart in La Pineda, Xavier Amor, agrees, saying there is no point in trying to fix the problem by patching it up.
Vilaplana believes the only long-term solution is to move the line inland, to run parallel with the motorway. Not only would this guarantee the safety and viability of the train – he says it is only luck that there hasn’t been a serious accident – it would free up land that would allow for wider beaches, which research shows is the best defence against erosion.
Although there is widespread agreement that the line needs to move inland, he says the plan has been stalled by a lack of political will and, with an estimated cost of €30bn, cash.
“It’s hard to justify doing nothing on economic grounds when they’re spending millions on high-speed rail links that no one is using,” Vilaplana says, a reference to Spain’s high-speed rail network, which is second only to China in distance covered but has struggled to find enough passengers to be financially viable.
While moving the line inland may be the best environmental solution, thousands of commuters will lament the loss of the curious but joyous sensation of being on a train that seems to travel by sea.
