Benidorm improves the monitoring of its coastal water quality with two smart buoys on Poniente and Levante beaches

Benidorm City Council will soon be able to improve the monitoring of its coastal water quality thanks to two smart buoys on Poniente and Levante beaches. These buoys were installed today and will "extract valuable information to assess water quality and protect the health of the aquatic ecosystem," according to Mónica Gómez, Councillor for Beaches and the Environment.

The Councillor emphasised that "the information will provide and reinforce the measurements that the Municipal Laboratory conducts weekly during the summer and every two weeks during the rest of the year to check the state of the waters and detect any anomalies in the bathing areas of our beaches."

Specifically, among the parameters that will now be monitored in real time by these buoys are water temperature, the presence of hydrocarbons, dissolved organic matter, salinity, turbidity, and dissolved oxygen.

All this information will enable the generation of new, highly valuable services for citizens and tourists, such as daily reports on bathing water quality or the implementation of actions aimed at protecting the natural heritage of the beaches. In this regard, the "Benidorm, a smart and sustainable tourist destination" project plans to display water quality information both in a tourist mobile app and on the City Council's beach website, which will be launched soon.

Furthermore, the extracted data will be integrated for analysis into the Tourism Smart platform. The City Council departments will be able to access dashboards to improve decision-making. To ensure environmental compatibility, the location of each buoy has been carefully chosen and agreed upon with the Institute of Coastal Ecology, a Foundation of the Valencian Community whose main function is to contribute to the conservation of marine, coastal, and terrestrial ecosystems.

Gómez emphasised that "the beaches are our main tourist and environmental resource, and that's why 'Benidorm, a smart and sustainable tourist destination' project includes initiatives that promote even better and more sustainable management of these beaches, while ensuring that citizens have as much information as possible in real time."

Location and features

Both buoys will be installed at two aquatic points located in the central areas of Poniente and Levante beaches, outside the boundaries of the Posidonia meadows, without interfering with them in any way. The buoy anchoring system chosen will be low-impact and consists of a concrete biotope dead anchor, with an elastic mooring that prevents the chain from rubbing against the seabed.

Based on the location and design of the marine sensor vertical, a buoy model and technical equipment were chosen that matched the needs of Benidorm coastline and the project. The chosen oceanographic buoy weighs approximately 360 kg, a design that guarantees recognition by vessels and a stable configuration with an integrated counterweight to ensure its verticality.

The implementation of this technology is one of the initiatives included in the "Benidorm, a smart and sustainable tourist destination" project, promoted by the City Council and also co-financed with ERDF funds through Red.es, a public entity attached to the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, through the State Secretariat for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence. The objective of the project, awarded to Telefónica, is to consolidate the city's transformation through the use of innovation and technology to ensure sustainable tourism development.