Crafted natures: A beach as seen by its fishermen

Abstract

Today, many European cities are still struggling to reinvent their development model in response to the effects of deindustrialization. It is in this context that nature, landscape and heritage are gaining more and more importance within leisure- and tourism-based urban models. This is the case for Cadiz, a small city in southern Spain where La Caleta, a small beach located downtown, has become one of the main tourist icons of the city. Due to its particular location, history and morphology, this small beach boasts a vast diversity of ichthyofauna, and is also an important local heritage site which functions customarily as one of the city's most emblematic, active and dynamic open public spaces. Drawing from the results of an ongoing doctoral thesis, this presentation deals with the local fishermen's notion of nature in order to understand how they make sense of the symbolic and material reconstruction which the beach has undergone, and the position they're assigned in the process. By doing so, I show how this discourse is influenced by urban conflicts derived from the adaptation process taken by the city on its transformation from an industrial- to a tourism-based development model.