Evaluation of Coastal Scenery in Urban Beaches: Torres, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

• Main Author: Cristiano,Samanta C.
• Publication Date: 2016
• Other Authors: Rocketta,Gabriela C., Portz,Luana C., Anfuso,Giorgio, Gruber,Nelson L. S., Williams,Allan T.
• Format: Article
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Download full: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1646-88722016000100006
• topic: coastal management; coastal landscape; landscape quality

The Brazilian coastal zone (CZ) is recognized as a National Heritage by the Federal Constitution and the lack of adequate planning results in inappropriate soil occupation, which threats the integrity of the coastal and marine environments. In this context, the recognition of coastal and adjacent marine zone characteristics is essential for adequate CZ planning. This research evaluated coastal scenery of Torres municipal district, located on the north coast of Rio Grande do Sul State, south of Brazil, which receives a large number of visitors during the summer season, i.e. from December to March. In January 2014, a landscape quality evaluation of the beaches was realized. The method evaluates 26 natural and human parameters in order to classify beaches into 5 classes’ class 1 being the one with the highest landscape attractiveness and class 5 the less attractive one. In order to apply the checklist, the Torres coastline was divided into 12 sectors. These are all urban beaches, so human related characteristics had considerable weight on the analysis results indicated that the assessed sectors are distributed between classes 3, 4 and 5. The Guarita Park beach stands out from the others, being the only one classified as a class 3. Cal and Molhes beaches were classified as class 4, and the other sectors were classified as class 5. Results highlighted poor coastal zone management with much litter being found on the beaches, tourist support facilities located in inappropriate places together with discharge of waste waters from effluents. Most sites have physical parameters for which coastal zone managers can do little or nothing to alleviate scenic impact, so emphasis should be given to assessing ways of improvement/upgrading the different human usage parameters, amongst them special attention must be devoted to litter and waste water management.