Portuguese West Coast tourism resorts: an unfinished landscape of territorial liabilities

ABSTRACT

The research focuses on Portuguese West Coast tourism resorts and addresses the problem of unfinished estates as territorial liabilities left by the Global Financial Crisis on residential tourism and tourism-driven urbanization. After a significant expansion during the golden age, resorts have suffered drastic consequences under the crisis, financial imbalance and stagnation of the real estate market. This situation brings additional problems to land management and adequate responses have not been provided yet. Focusing on the municipality of Óbidos, this paper aims to describe the territorial changes induced by the development of resorts, criss-crossing a morphological analysis with the understanding of the context of the Global Financial Crisis and the assessment of the regulatory framework.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism urbanization
• resort
• residential tourism
• tourism planning
• unfinished estate

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the municipality of Óbidos that has provided geographic data and information on the outset of urban projects related to the licencing process. Many thanks to Nuno Machado (photo credit).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Célia Sousa Martins http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4173-3182

Cristina Soares Cavaco http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3074-8066

Notes

1. Although there is no precise official data available concerning the size of resorts, some studies provide an accurate reference. According to Pardal (2012), based on an inventory of current supply in the Oeste region, the size of resorts stands between 58 and 534 hectares. In the Algarve region, some of the most known resorts have also huge areas: Vale do Lobo (450 hectares), Vilamoura (1600 hectares) and Quinta do Lago (645 hectares) (Carvalho, 2015).

2. Loteamento (‘operação de loteamento’) is a legal figure foreseen in the Portuguese Law with no direct translation into English. It is an urban planning operation created in 1965 to manage urbanization permits, i.e. to manage the legal permission for private stakeholders and property owners to divide real estate properties into plots for further urban development and construction. The ‘loteamento’ is always subject to the issuing of administrative permits. But the figure falls outside the spatial planning system despite the similarities with the contents of a detailed plan.

3. The consolidation of Environmental Rule of Law determined a new kind of damage related to nature. An ecological damage exists when an ecological legal interest is disturbed or when a certain component of the environment is negatively affected. Founded on the principles of prevention and accountability, the Directive 2004/35/EC addresses ecological damages.

4. See also Martin (2014, p. 1040).

5. Hadjimichalis argues that apart from macroeconomic and financial factors, the debt crisis in the Eurozone, particularly in Southern economies, is founded in geographical conditions. The entry into circulation of the single currency (euro) without taking into account foundational social and geographical aspects (e.g. labour markets, financial policies, regulatory systems, etc.) has generated huge economic disparities that are at the forefront of an uneven mapping of the debt crisis. In a neo-liberal arena, non-productive sectors such as services and real estate investments, or even tourism, became expeditious means to leverage growth in the extremely fragile southern productive and entrepreneurial structures. Strong linkages shall be therefore established between indebtedness levels and the property bubble of peripheral economies, in which debt-fuelled real estate investments indirectly forced states into highly unsustainable levels of public debt to save the banking sector (See also: Observatório Metropolitano de Madrid, 2013; Bingre do Amaral, 2011).

6. 9.6 billion euros were spent between 1987 and 2011 by the Portuguese State, 73.3% of which were with respect to interest rate subsidies to housing and construction credits (Cavaco et al., 2016, p. 94).

7. The Algarve region confirms its distinct touristic position by reaching the highest share of second homes – 40%.

8. PNPOT is the National Spatial Development Policy Programme, which establishes the spatial strategy and the territorial model for the whole country.

9. PROT are the spatial plans adopted for the regions.

10. Although there is no official data to consubstantiate this tendency, this statement is based on qualitative appreciation collected from a set of interviews to developers and practitioners.

11. This methodology was adapted from the research project ‘Espacetur: Planning of Tourism Spaces in Coastal Areas’ funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT – PTDC/AUR-URB/118612/2010).

12. The territorial framework integrated on the macro-scale analysis corresponds to 327 hectares.

13. The problem of unfinished estates rather than tourist estates is not so critical in other urban areas (e.g. metropolitan area of Lisbon). A greater part of unfinished estates has little dimension and meets a fill-in role within a consolidated urban structure.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) under Grant SFRH/BD/101552/2014.