547. Foreign residential tourism in Costa Blanca: territorial impacts and representative case studies.

Abstract

A considerable transformation of the territorial occupation has occurred between 1990 and 2010 in the coast of the province of Alicante —Costa Blanca—. This territorial transformation is related to a raise in the Northern European population rate.In order to analyse the coincidence of these two processes, different kinds of information are collected: on the one hand, the occupied ground surface area from both projects CORINE (CoORdination of INformation of the Environment) Land Cover and SIOSE (Information System on Land Occupation of Spain); and, on the other hand, demographic data obtained from INE (Spanish Statistical Office) and FRONTUR (Survey of tourist movements at borders) databases, among others. The identification of case studies assumes the analysis of the provincial global data and then the district data. This approach allows figuring out which are the most representative municipalities with the highest rates of foreign population and where the largest ground occupation has occurred. Once these municipalities have been identified the aim is to describe the urban settlement characteristics. The findings of this study confirm that residential tourism is linked to urban occupation growth and the increase of Northern European population. Moreover, it is revealed that these residential areas are built according to specific patterns and architectural typologies.