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It’s a sunny Monday in Viña del Mar (Chile) and Gonzalo Pavez is trying to remember what the view from Los 14 Asiatos viewpoint was like a few years ago when he was little to see the sea. Today, a series of huge buildings stand between the activist, originally from Cerro Santa Inés, and the Pacific coast that borders the Valparaíso region. This is a reality repeated in almost all 38 municipalities that make up this region invaded by residential and tourist real estate projects that have radically transformed the coast.
Pavez, member of the environmental coordinator of Viña del Mar, in which 24 organizations participate, including organizations and civilians linked to the defense of the territory, recalls how this city has changed. “This city was known as a garden city, but today it lies under masses of concrete and cement.” This contrast is also reflected in a sad balance sheet: The Valparaíso region is the one with the most socio-ecological conflicts in the country.
With numerous active disputes, real estate companies have used the legal vacuum, non-realistic regulations and the limited powers of some supervisory authorities to expand their construction projects.
A few walks in the dunes of Concón from where you can see the buildings along the Cristobal Venegas coast
“It’s a situation of struggle, of struggle, of permanent mobilizations,” says Rodrigo Mundaca, governor of the Valparaíso region and one of the founders of the movement to defend access to water, land and the environment (Modatima). . It was precisely his work leading environmentalists that gave him the popularity that later led to his being elected authority in May 2021 with more than 40% of the yes vote.
Today, on the edge of the institutional framework, he assures that “the pressure exerted on the territory by the real estate stocks is in fact responsible for the need to protect the environment: to have a program or policy of territorial spatial planning linked to it land-use capacities that focus on protecting the environment and our communities and territories.”
More buildings and fewer houses
“They intervene in the environment to build buildings that sit empty year-round. They’re second or third homes for people who don’t live here,” says Pavez, walking along the coast.
The environmentalist points his hands at the half-assembled structures of the multi-million project for the Hyatt hotel in Viña del Mar, which had to halt construction due to irregularities in the permits. Like this one, several white elephants stand on the shoreline of the great Valparaíso.
Carolina Rojas, a researcher at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (Cedeus), agrees that in the past this area was the center of second homes for Santiago residents. What began as a small-scale housing phenomenon has intensified with the construction of high-rise buildings in relation to the region’s resilience. “Many of them have ponds or artificial lagoons that have damaged wetlands or dunes. It is an urbanization that has little or nothing to do with nature and the landscape. Rather, they try to make the most of the view and the beach. You can often see that in what happened in Concón. A kind of urbanization that becomes rude in the sense that the only thing that matters is the landscape attribute,” he says.
View of the buildings along the coast in the municipality of Concón. Christopher Venegas
Concón, a town north of Viña del Mar that now has just over 40,000 inhabitants, used to be a small seaside resort that rose to prominence in the summer but kept the rhythm of a seaside town the rest of the time. Today, the narrow street that meanders along the edge of the sea is full of tall towers planted amidst the sand dunes.
Fabiola Ruiz, president of the environmental organization Patrimonio Vivo Costa de Concón, is working to stop real estate pressure on the dunes and the coast. Hoy explains that when the regulatory plan was last updated in the community, there was a process that was not fully transparent and was not communicated to the entire community. “Construction and approved projects are already on the table, and most are without environmental impact studies,” he says.
Álvaro Eraso, director of the Protege Los Molles group, knows a lot about this conversion, which last month filed a criminal complaint against a real estate company, a water company and authorities in the Valparaíso region, including Mundaca itself, in his capacity as a public authority , for the usurpation and damage to the beach and wetland of the Los Molles estuary. “The environmental, zoning and damage situation that has occurred with real estate in Los Molles has been going on for many years and there have been knocks on the doors of almost all authorities, but nothing has changed,” explains Eraso.
The Los Molles defender says the scale of the intervention is such that a year ago a condominium project was underway that included about 200 homes stretching across the sand to the sea. “Fortunately, with the arrival of the new mayor, we were able to bring this project down administratively, but the Los Molles beachfront land is still being taken over as if it were owned by the real estate company,” says Eraso, who has been fighting for years with no problems toward a definitive solution find one that protects your city’s beach.
For Rojas, the region’s tourism vocation – which generates revenue and on which many communities depend – is one of the reasons why more permits are being given out indiscriminately. “Of course, the regulations fail here, because in order to issue building permits, you first need planning instruments,” he explains. Rojas, also a researcher at the Millennium Institute for Coastal Socio-Ecology Secos, points out that the way the law defines land use, or the regulatory plan’s guidelines, should be more up-to-date.
Two fishermen on the oceanic rocks of Concón, overlooking the buildings along the Cristobal Venegas coast
“15 years ago there might not have been as much awareness of environmental issues or the importance of not intervening as they did in areas like Concón, for example, but today there is a lot more information. It is known that there are other ways to build and what failed,” says Rojas.
But the real estate boom is taking place in a particular context: despite the number of buildings and condominiums under construction, the Valparaíso region is the area where there is the greatest number of homeless people living in makeshift camps due to the lack of housing projects.
A comprehensive view between land and sea
Although Chile has more than 6,000 kilometers of coastline and a connection to the sea that runs through its geography, its projection is mainly based on the mainland. In fact, in the 1970s at the School of Architecture of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, a group of academics introduced the notion of the maritime to precisely explain the contradiction between the functioning of the Patagonian archipelagos and the way of life of the natives with low impact in open ecosystems .
“Maritorio is proposed as a concept to visualize the sea in a supercontinental country. For example, the 1980 Constitution only speaks of territory and twice mentions the word sea. Hopefully, the new draft constitution that fell through made a few mentions of the sea or merit. In other words, this continental and terrestrial logic of thought has not changed,” explains Ricardo Álvarez, anthropologist and researcher at the Ocean, Heritage and Culture Millennium Nucleus (OHC).
A child looks out to sea at Las Conchitas beach in the Valparaiso region on December 7, 2022. Cristóbal Venegas
In a seismic country like Chile and in the context of climate change, not considering the sea when planning a city can be a decision as irresponsible as it is naïve: tidal waves have increased in recent years and in some areas the sand has shrunk and diminished the space of the beach.
“In terms of coastal dynamics, there is this image of the coast as something static, and history shows throughout Chile that the coast is super dynamic. The sea rises and falls, or the land rises and falls. The dunes are constantly changing. It’s something that moves in time, you can’t rely on it, not even in a wetland, that moves, changes, transforms,” says Álvarez.
“The difficult question to solve is how do we introduce changes in the regulations when we are in a scenario of uncertainty in terms of ecosystems and also climate phenomena that are happening much faster now,” Rojas wonders.
Meanwhile, Gonzalo Pavez believes hope is a tough place to be in these times. “I didn’t ask,” says the environmentalist when asked how he imagines the future of his city. “The environmental struggle here is a struggle of resistance.”