Story and photos by Pearl Marvell
Early one morning in Rincón, Puerto Rico, a bulldozer equipped with a jackhammer rumbled across Los Almendros beach toward a half-built cement wall sticking out of the sand in front of a condominium complex called Sol y Playa. The words “propiedad del pueblo,” or “property of the people,” had been spray-painted on the wall, as was a turtle, a symbol of a growing movement in Puerto Rico.
A crowd gathered around the bulldozer, cheering and chanting as the machine ripped away sections of the wall: “Ese muro es ilegal y lo vamos a tumbar.” “This wall is illegal, and we are going to tear it down.”
The protesters were right. The wall was in la zona marítimo-terrestre, the maritime-terrestrial zone: an area where waves are known to reach, particularly during hurricanes and seasonal storms.
In Puerto Rico, all beaches are by law public property. The condo association of Sol y Playa was given a deadline of March 1, 2023, to pull the wall down. When they didn’t, residents, environmentalists, and activists decided to take matters into their own hands.
The bulldozer didn’t make too much progress. The police seized it and arrested three people on charges of trespassing. But this crowd wasn’t going to give up.
They had brought sledgehammers.
A fight exacerbated by climate change
Coastal communities in Puerto Rico and elsewhere have seen an uptick in conflicts over access and beach protections as residents debate what to do about erosion from rising seas and stronger storms, both problems fueled by the changing climate. In Puerto Rico, the problem is worsened by lax oversight of new construction, and a real estate boom propelled by a law that allows new residents to avoid paying income tax so long as they live on the island for a minimum of six months.
Along the coastline in Dorado, waterfront property owners have hired private security to close public points of access — a violation of Puerto Rican law. At a protest at Las Golondrinas caves in Aguadilla, a security guard shot a protester in the leg.
Zair Dalí Torres Medina, one of the protesters at the caves, was moved to tears when she saw the environmental impact of the construction, and knew that she needed to be part of the fight against it. “If I don’t do anything about it, what’s going to be left?” she said. “This is all we’ve got.”
Torres Medina left the island after Hurricane Maria, along with over 130,000 others — four percent of Puerto Rico’s population. She returned in 2022 and made a promise that she wouldn’t leave again no matter how many hurricanes come. She said that the sentiment on the island is “el pueblo salva el pueblo,” “The community saves itself.”
“It has been a long time since we have trusted the government,” she said.
Sometimes, all it takes is a turtle
The Sol y Playa conflict began after Hurricane Maria in 2017, when the pool in front of the complex was destroyed, as was much of the beach.
In January 2021, the condo association received the necessary permits and began construction later that year — right on the public beach, near where turtles nest. And when a hawksbill turtle clambered up the beach to nest and got stuck on the construction site for four hours, the conflict came to a head.
A group of concerned residents set up an encampment with tents, flags, and signs in the public parking lot next to the condos and along the beachfront in front of the construction. They named the encampment Campamento Carey after the trapped hawksbill turtle.
Within three weeks, Puerto Rico’s department of natural resources produced a cease-and-desist order to stop construction, but hours later, the order was amended to allow construction to continue so long as workers blocked nesting turtles from accessing the site. Protests ensued.
Campamento Carey has become a community-supported and funded movement with the goal of ensuring beaches remain public and easily accessible across the island. “Yo soy Carey” has become a widespread motto. Thousands of people have bought merchandise, provided food and water to protesters, and attended protests. Social media has carried their messages across the island and abroad.
“This is not unique to Rincón. It’s just here there has been so much scrutiny in it,” said Steve Tamar, a Rincón resident who has been involved in the fight against the Sol y Playa construction since the beginning. Tamar said that he and other volunteers have been monitoring water quality at Los Almendros beach for years, and they noticed a huge difference in the beachfront in 2017. “All of a sudden, 50 percent of the beach is gone after Hurricane Maria,” he said. “This is not a place where you want to authorize construction.”
Maria changed everything
Maritza Barreto Orta is the director of Puerto Rico’s Institute of Coastal Investigation and Planning. Barreto has studied the island’s coastline for decades and released a study in 2021 looking at how it has changed since the passing of Maria.
What she found is that though beaches are in a constant state of flux, Maria significantly impacted the coastline and stripped a large number of natural barriers like reefs and mangroves that once protected the beaches from erosion and storms.
“The shoreline is moving inwards in many municipalities in Puerto Rico,” Barreto Orta says. This change has caused a “cascade effect,” meaning that even weaker storms like the ones that occur regularly during the winter months can dramatically reshape the coastline. And climate change is increasing the risk of another superstorm like Maria. Puerto Rico’s changing coastline can be seen with the naked eye. A railroad built around the coastline of the island back in the late 1800s to transport sugar cane is falling into the ocean in certain areas, with much of the damage occurring in the past five years.
Surfrider, a local nonprofit, and CARICOOS, a climate and weather agency, proposed that the Army Corps build a submerged sea wall or artificial reef off the coast of Playa Los Almendros to break the force of incoming waves, but in 2022, the Army Corps announced that Puerto Rico would have to wait until at least 2029 for a fix, potentially too late to help with another storm like Maria.
Changing neighborhoods
Abigail Pastor Cotler lives not far from Los Almendros beach. She was evacuated during Hurricane Maria, and when she returned home, she was horrified to discover the beach had vanished. Since then, sand has naturally accumulated again, but the beach hasn’t been fully restored to its pre-Maria state.
Not only did the coastline change after Maria, so did the neighborhood. Many of Pastor Cotler’s neighbors sold their waterfront properties after the hurricane because they were no longer able to insure them or have a mortgage.
“The people that are buying them now are not worried about that,” she says, alluding to new laws that have created a huge spike in real estate prices, properties being bought up and turned into AirBnBs, making affordable, long-term housing in coastal communities more difficult to find, and often new restrictions on access to the coast.
Recently, a draft for a climate change resiliency law was submitted to Puerto Rico’s government. It specifically highlights coastal erosion and how to mitigate the effects of flooding, heavy seas, and sea level rise, but it will take until next year for the law to be sent to the floor. In the meantime, much of the island’s coastline construction goes unchecked.
But residents and nongovernmental organizations have banded together to preserve access to beaches. Pedro Roig is an urban planner and architect, as well as the former vice president of the Junta de Planificación, Puerto Rico’s planning board. He said that in the past couple of years, there has been a big shift in the way that Puerto Ricans see their coastline. They have realized that it is something that needs to be protected. “We all own it,” he said.
Roig has been prominent in nearly all the recent fights (he even made an appearance in Bad Bunny’s “El Apagón” music video, which is essentially a mini-doc about the community’s fight for access to its beaches). His scientific expertise is difficult for governmental agencies to ignore.
“There are now many citizens who feel comfortable talking about public property and what is the ‘high water mark,’ ” he said. “These were terms that only surveyors and other individuals with technical expertise talked about.”
Potential solutions
Roig said that taking into consideration climate change and erosion, the shoreline’s location should only be valid for development planning for a period of five years. “The position of this line made in 2017 needs to be revised because in 2023, it was different,” he said.
Definition of low- and high-water marks is based on Spanish law from the 1800s. Besides being antiquated, it is based on an entirely different region of the world. “The problem has been the interpretation of this law which has allowed for developers to use it to their favor,” says Hector Varela Vélez, community organizer for Surfrider Foundation. Varela Vélez said potential developers claim the high-water mark is a lot lower than it actually is, allowing them to citrcumvent the law. Concerned citizens and environmental nonprofits have successfully challenged some of the permits in court, where photos and video footage make it feasible for community members to prove where the actual high-water mark is, especially during storms.
“The government and the private sectors have a responsibility to know the projections and threats that are present on the coast and to avoid construction there,” said Barreto Orta. She said weather models show that a heavy swell brought about by a category three, four, or five hurricane would put many current coastal zones underwater. She recommends that Puerto Rico create a no-go zone for construction near the high-water line, much like what the mainland U.S. has done.
The Junta de Planificación (planning board) and the Department of Natural & Environmental Resources (DRNA) did not respond to interview requests.
Barreto Orta added that a concerted effort is needed to ensure that all government departments that should be involved in the planning and permitting process are sharing data and communicating clearly with each other. “At times, one agency doesn’t know what the other agency is doing,” she said.
Though Barreto Orta says that she is optimistic that agencies will work together to address coastal risks, many environmental activists and concerned citizens have more faith in the communities of Puerto Rico. Residents interviewed for this story often mentioned two words: “autogestión comunitaria,” or “community self-management.”
“When Hurricane Maria passed, we were incalculably affected,” said Varela Vélez. “We’ve seen how the communities have understood what community self-management is and how they have created something similar to what they did after the hurricane in order to take back their island.”
The future
In the spring of 2023, the wall at Sol y Playa was still standing, although it was smaller than it was before the bulldozer got to it.
Campamento Carey held a competition to see who could knock down parts of the wall using a sledgehammer. Now, there is no wall. Campamento Carey is a success story that has been told and retold at other protests held around the island, because the fight has not stopped as coastline access becomes more precarious. Campamento Carey has become a symbol of what communities can do when they come together to fight for what is theirs.
This story originally appeared on the Yale Climate Connections digital platform (yaleclimateconnections.org) and is reprinted here by permission of the publisher.
