"Sand, Sun, Sea and Sex with Strangers."
Spain’s Canary Islands, floating west of sunny
North Africa is on every surfer-worth-her-salt’s “places to go and
poke around” list. Razor sharp volcanic reefs, feisty locals, nooks
and crannies to explore and maybe get lucky within. The chain also
just so happens to be on many
sexually-adventurous-tourist-worth-his-chaps, hosting a very large
Gay Pride festival etc. but a damning new report has fingered this
casual public sex, not surfing, with destroying the
environment.
According to
CNN, a new paper in the Journal of Environmental
Management — “Sand, Sun, Sea and Sex with Strangers, the ‘five S’s.
Characterizing ‘cruising’ activity and its environmental impacts on
a protected coastal dunefield” — looks for the first time at the
environmental impact on the coastal reserve being used as a
cruising area.
Researchers inventoried 298 “sex spots” on the beach, over a
total area of over two square miles, mainly among “bushy and dense
vegetation” and nebkhas — dunes that wad up around vegetation. They
studied them during May 2018, a period which included the local Gay
Pride festival.
The tourists’ sex, and “cruiser trampling,” impacts
“directly” not only on the nebkhas, but also on eight native plant
species, three of which are endemic, they found.
As a result of the tourists’ activities, there has been a
“complete abandonment” of environmental education in the reserve,
according to the study. The reserve was originally created with
education as a “primary activity.”
What’s more, Gran Canaria giant lizards — a popular sight in
the Canary islands — have “died after eating condoms left behind by
pleasure seekers,” wrote Patrick Hesp, one of the report’s authors,
in an article for The Conversation.
Hosting up to 14 million visitors a year, Gran Canaria is a
gay-friendly tourist destination, with visitors from the US, UK and
Germany among the main markets, and while the authors are quick to
emphasize that there is “no intention to criticize some of the
LGBTI community,” and stressed that it was not just LGBTQ visitors
having sex in the dunes, they note that “cruising is openly
practiced” on Maspalomas.
At the end, the authors of the paper did not want to call for an
end to public sex but noted, “One couple having sex on the beach is
one thing; but having hundreds converge on the same area every day
damages the dunes as much as off-road driving does.”
Surfing, mercifully, spared any wrath.
