The future of Bocagrande

Abstract

Most hotels in the touristic city of Cartagena, Colombia are in Bocagrande. Bocagrande is coping with several issues which affect the social economic value of the peninsula. Flooding, coastal erosion, overtopping waves and lack of accessibility are the general issues mentioned by the stakeholders. They all seem to be interrelated and therefore all these issues are taken into account in this project. In order to capture the overall problem that will be investigated in this study the following research question is formulated: What is the best integral solution for Bocagrande, concerning the problems of coastal erosion, flooding, overtopping waves and lack of accessibility, in order to secure the social and economic value that the peninsula has for the city of Cartagena? One of the major issues is the poor accessibility of Bocagrande. Since the increase of hotels and apartment buildings, nothing as been done to the infrastructure. There is one road that connects the peninsula to the city, of which the capacity is too low for the amount of traffic, resulting in congestion. This gets even worse when the streets are flooded. There are two types of floods, small scale and large scale. Small scale flooding happens every month on a part of Bocagrande, the bayside, due to high tide. This small scale flooding decreases the velocity and the capacity of the roads. There is no protection and no drainage system so the sea water can only be discharged with low tide. The sea water also causes damage to cars and property, since the basements of the hotels and apartments get flooded. Heavy precipitation also causes small scale flooding and decreases the road capacity and velocity. When high tide and heavy precipitation coincide with storm conditions, large scale flooding occur, which means that the whole of Bocagrande is flooded. The peninsula is then completely cut off from the city and nobody can leave or enter the peninsula without a boat. This integral solution consists of the following parts: 1) Construction of a berm and a raise of the seawall near Punta Santo Domingo to reduce overtopping. This will reduce damage to the road and increase accessibility by making both of the two lanes available. 2) A wall with vegetated dunes along the seaside coast of Bocagrande will reduce future erosion and prevent flooding. The resulting availability of a beach during the tourist season will add value for the hotels, restaurants and the small vendors. 3) Construction of T groynes and nourishment near El Laguito create a beach, preventing flooding and reducing erosion. The beach restores the old situation where restaurants are located. lt also protects the buildings from damage due to erosion. 4) Filling the lake on El Laguito economically solves the degrading water quality problem and adds valuable land to Bocagrande. 5) A wall along the bayside of Bocagrande prevents flooding which reduces the amount of damage to property behind the wall and increases the road capacity. 6) The accessibility of Bocagrande increases by the previous solutions. However constructing a tunnel from Bocagrande to Manga increases the accessibility even more. The increase of accessibility of Bocagrande, decreases the total travel time. The integral solution covers all the problem areas indicated by the system analyses and secures the social and economic value of Bocagrande by limiting the effects and adding value where possible.