Tourist Beach Sorts as a Classification Tool for Integrated Beach Management in Latin America

Integrated beach management is an application of the integrated coastal management framework in a local scale. However, not all beaches must be managed in the same way. Thus, the classification of beaches becomes a key tool for management. On the other hand, integrated tools for beach management are few, most of them being technical and focused on one discipline; a holistic approach is needed. Technical literature shows few classification proposals, focusing on two or three kinds of beaches. This study seeks to propose a new classification of tourist beaches based on an epistemological framework. A review of fourteen references was done and five criteria to classify beaches were assessed. Special focus was put on Latin-American classifications due to the scope of the study. As a result, four tourist beach sorts were determined: intensive, shared, ethnic and conservative beaches. Moreover, a set of stages was designed to choose each sort and was applied on five Colombian beaches. The application shows a great flexibility of the set of stages, classifying the beaches into the four types aforementioned. If beaches are well classified before starting their management, the latter will be better and more accurate. This new tool developed in this paper can be used as a strong advice to beach managers. The first stage to manage any tourist beach will be to classify them in the correct sorts to later move onto the conventional stages, such as description and planning