Looking out onto the beach of Platja d’Aro, Josep has tears in his eyes.
“I used to play and swim here as a kid, when the beach was twice as big,” the 48-year-old teacher says.
Today, the main beach in the popular Catalonian holiday resort on Spain’s Costa Brava coastline is some 50 metres (164 feet) wide on average. In the 1980s, it was three times that size, according to a report in the La Vanguardia newspaper.
Estimates differ and there are no official figures available, but everyone agrees that the beach has been getting “smaller and smaller” for decades, restaurant owner Aldo says.
Beaches are also vanishing elsewhere in Spain, a country that depends heavily on the millions of holidaymakers from Europe and elsewhere that descend on its coastlines every year.