Sand, Sea, and Systems Thinking
Diagnosing Coastal Erosion at Voroklini Beach
Observing the Shoreline
A few weeks ago, while walking along the coastal walkway at Voroklini Beach, a familiar route I’ve taken many times before, something caught my attention. The beach looked... different. Eerily so. The once wide and sandy stretch had thinned. Sections of the concrete path had started to crack and collapse, undercut by the encroaching sea. Even the beach football court, once a lively summer hub, was half-swallowed by the surf.
Pictures from April 2025
Naturally, my curiosity kicked in.
What had changed? Had a storm passed recently? Was this simply the result of natural seasonal variation? Or was something more systematic at play?
As it turns out, this wasn't just the sea doing what the sea does — this was a response to human intervention. And it all centers around a decision to remove an old breakwater and install a new system of offshore structures. Was it a good or bad decision?
What follows is a personal investigation, part observation, part engineering curiosity into how well-intentioned coastal interventions can reshape the very thing they’re meant to protect. If you're interested in physics, systems thinking, or just enjoy dissecting the "why" behind the world around us, I invite you to read on.
Coastal Engineering 101: How We (Try to) Tame the Shore
Coastlines are dynamic systems (my PhD is in Dynamical Systems btw, feel free to download it here). They breathe, shift, and evolve constantly in response to wind, waves, and currents. Some of these forces operate over hours; others, over decades. When we try to "fix" a beach to keep it in place or stop it from eroding, we are essentially stepping into this complex dance of forces. That’s where coastal engineering comes in.
One of the most common tools used by engineers is the breakwater. Think of it as a shield. A structure placed in or along the water to absorb or deflect wave energy before it reaches the shore. But not all breakwaters are created equal.
Attached vs. Detached Breakwaters
An attached breakwater looks like a shoulder is built directly connected to the shore, acting like a solid barrier between the land and the waves.
A detached breakwater, on the other hand, is built offshore, parallel to the coastline but separated from it by some distance.
The idea behind detached breakwaters is subtle: they don’t stop the waves entirely, but they reduce their energy before they hit the beach. This often causes sand to accumulate behind them, forming shallow lagoons or “tombolos” (think of them as natural sand bridges between the shore and the structure). However, by altering the natural flow of sediment, especially the longshore drift (the steady current that moves sand along the coastline) they can also trigger unintended consequences.
What Changed at Voroklini?
For many years, Voroklini Beach was protected by a single attached breakwater, a rock structure in front of Lebay Beach hotel, extending into the sea. This breakwater served as a shield, absorbing much of the wave energy and helping sand accumulate in the pocket behind it, keeping the beach wide and the infrastructure stable.
Lebay beach hotel in 2022
But this wasn’t a perfect solution. Like most hard coastal defenses, it came with trade-offs. The protected beach was relatively static, perhaps even a bit artificial, while the surrounding coastline was left less shielded, and likely experienced subtle shifts in erosion and sediment transport. Over time, signs of stress became visible further along the coast.
In fact, public concern over coastal erosion in the Voroklini and nearby Pervolia areas had been growing for years. Reports going back to at least 2022 describe citizens, local officials, and environmentalists calling for action to protect the disappearing beach. According to a Philenews article, nearly 23 metres of beach had already been lost in some areas. And in a Cyprus Mail update, it was noted that the government had begun funding projects to install new wave breakers as a solution to the escalating problem.
In this light, the municipality’s decision to remove the old attached breakwater and install a series of detached breakwaters can be seen not as a careless act, but as a direct response to mounting pressure to do something — and fast.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with complex environmental systems, the solution may have exacerbated the very issue it sought to address.
Since the installation:
Waters behind the new breakwaters have become extremely shallow, with sand accumulating into semi-permanent bars (tombolos).
Areas just east of the new breakwaters are now eroding rapidly, with visible damage to pedestrian infrastructure.
The beach football court, is now partly submerged.
The lifeguard tower will soon also be eroded.
These are not isolated symptoms — they’re characteristic of a system thrown out of balance by an intervention that failed to account for the full complexity of coastal sediment dynamics.
Unintended Consequences: When Fixing One Problem Creates Another
In hindsight, the installation of detached breakwaters along Voroklini Beach seems to have achieved only partial success. On paper, the structures were supposed to provide wave protection and encourage natural beach regeneration — and they have, to some extent, within the immediate footprint of the breakwaters. The waters behind them are calm and shallow. Sand has accumulated. On a very narrow scale, the beach looks like it's returning, perhaps too much with small ponds forming, trapping fish in them.
Step just a few hundred meters down the coast, particularly eastward, in the direction of the prevailing longshore drift, and the picture changes dramatically.
What we’re seeing here is a textbook example of sediment starvation. Along most of Cyprus’ southern coast, waves approach the shore at an angle that steadily pushes sand from west to east. This continuous movement of sediment is critical to maintaining a stable shoreline. When breakwaters (especially detached ones) trap sediment behind them, they interrupt this natural conveyor belt. As a result, beaches further along the coast which depend on that moving sediment begin to shrink.
And that’s exactly what’s happening in Voroklini. The new breakwaters are capturing the sand, but failing to allow it to flow further down the coast. The consequences:
The sand stays trapped in shallow lagoons between the breakwaters and the shore.
The areas beyond the last breakwater receive no replenishment.
Erosion picks up pace, eating away at infrastructure, landscaping, and any exposed section of coast.
Before (left), and after (right) clearly showing the attached breakwater removal, and the sand being trapped by the newly added detached breakwarers.
These aren’t slow, long-term changes either — they’ve occurred within months of the new structures being installed, and weeks before the 2025 summer season is due to begin in May, with Lebay Beach hotel, Mercure Beach Resort and Radison Beach hotel, all considering to drop the “Beach” from their names due to the lack of it.
OK. Of course, coastal engineering always involves trade-offs. You rarely get to protect everything, everywhere. But here, it seems the problem was displaced, not solved — moved just far enough down the beach to feel out of sight, but close enough that its impacts are now plainly visible.
It’s important to acknowledge that I don’t have access to the full technical study that informed this redesign. Perhaps models were used. Perhaps constraints, ecological, financial, or political, shaped the final choice. But the outcome is what it is…
Learning from Elsewhere: Global Lessons in Coastal Design
Voroklini Beach is far from the only place where an attempt to protect the coast has backfired. Around the world, we see a striking pattern: when sediment transport systems are disrupted by well-meaning engineering, the coastline reacts — often in unexpected and unwelcome ways.
Here are a few examples worth reflecting on:
📍 Vagueira, Portugal
On Portugal’s west coast, the town of Vagueira faced severe erosion pressures from Atlantic storms. Engineers installed two detached breakwaters to shield the beach and reduce wave energy. The result? Exactly what we’re seeing in Voroklini: sand accumulated behind the breakwaters, but erosion accelerated downstream, threatening infrastructure further along the coast. The project had to be reassessed and supplemented with additional measures. (download article)
📍 Yeongrang Beach, South Korea
South Korea introduced submerged detached breakwaters (SDBWs) at Yeongrang Beach to manage shoreline retreat. But the breakwaters failed to stabilize the beach as expected. Erosion patterns shifted rather than disappeared, and the area behind the structures required regular maintenance. The lesson? Structures that look elegant in design often don’t behave linearly in real-world conditions. (download article)
📍 Timaru, New Zealand
At Washdyke Lagoon, a breakwater installed to protect a commercial port disrupted the longshore sediment flow. Over a century, this resulted in the retreat of a coastal barrier by 400 meters. That wasn’t just an ecological disaster, it also created long-term liabilities for local infrastructure and water quality. (download article)
📍 Goleta Beach, California
In California, ongoing erosion at Goleta Beach sparked fierce debate. Some advocated for hard structures like groynes and breakwaters; others pushed for soft solutions like nourishment and dune restoration. Ultimately, case studies there underscored a key principle: any intervention must consider the full sediment budget, or the problem just shifts somewhere else. (download article)
What these stories share is not failure, but incompleteness. Most interventions worked in the short term or within narrowly defined scopes. But none of them fully respected the systems they were interfering with: systems governed by decades of wave patterns, sediment flows, and ecological balances.
Which begs the question: can we do better in Cyprus?
Rethinking the Shoreline: Smarter Solutions for Voroklini
So what can realistically be done to improve the situation at Voroklini?
Let’s be clear: there’s no silver bullet. Once coastal processes are disturbed, especially by permanent structures like breakwaters, the system settles into a new equilibrium, one that often requires ongoing intervention to manage. Still, there are several strategies that could help mitigate the unintended effects of the recent redesign, if applied wisely and in combination.
1. Groynes (Carefully Positioned)
Groynes are short, perpendicular structures built from the shore into the sea. Unlike breakwaters, they work by intercepting sand moving along the coast (via longshore drift), allowing beaches to rebuild naturally.
They must be used judiciously — too many, or poorly spaced, and they simply shift the erosion problem further down. Larnaca’s Mackenzie beach has successfully used groynes to create pocket beaches.
2. Beach Nourishment + Dune Restoration
Instead of blocking or capturing sediment, beach nourishment adds more of it by trucking or pumping sand from external sources to widen the beach and recreate a buffer zone.
Combined with dune restoration, this approach helps dissipate wave energy more gently and protects built infrastructure.
Yes, it's a recurring cost, and yes, it requires maintenance. But it’s also reversible, adaptive, and soft, in both the ecological and engineering sense.
3. Revisiting the Breakwater Design
If the detached breakwaters are proving too effective at trapping sediment, then their design should be revisited. Options include:
Shortening the structures slightly
Introducing more gaps or “notches” to allow sediment to pass through
Staggering their alignment to deflect rather than stop wave action
These are subtle interventions — and would require modeling before execution — but they speak to a philosophy of adaptation, rather than rigid control.
4. Offshore Reefs or Artificial Submerged Structures
A more ecological twist on breakwaters is to use low-profile, submerged reefs that serve dual purposes: reducing wave energy while also fostering marine biodiversity.
These “eco-reefs” can be constructed using limestone blocks, specially designed reef units, or even bio-friendly concrete. They don’t stop sediment — they simply soften the impact of waves. And as a bonus, they support fish habitats, improve water quality, and open the door for low-impact marine tourism like snorkeling.
5. Monitoring, Feedback, and Iteration
Coastlines change continuously. Whatever strategy is pursued next, it must be guided by real-time observation. Regular monitoring via drones, satellite imagery, and even simple GPS benchmarks can provide vital data on erosion rates, beach width, and seasonal variations.
In other words: treat the beach like an experimental system, not a one-time construction project. Watch it. Learn from it. Iterate.
Cyprus has many excellent research institutes of oceanography, marine and maritime (link, link and link), and I’d be surprised if they haven’t modelled, experimented, or been consulted by the relevant municipal authorities prior to making any large and “hard” coastal interventions. In fact, all this seems to stem from a 2002 study performed by the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) the full text of which I was unable to find online. News articles however seem to suggest that what was proposed by NTUA in 2002 was not immediately implemented, but actually languished for 15+ years due to funding and planning delays, during which time erosion worsened and strips of beach were lost (link).
Final Thoughts: Systems Thinking at the Shore
What’s happening at Voroklini Beach is not just a local issue, it’s a reflection of a broader pattern: our tendency to treat complex, living systems as if they were static and linear.
We intervene at one point and expect the rest of the system to stay put. But the coast is not static. It is shaped by feedback loops, by interconnected flows of energy and matter. Yes, it’s a natural system, but also a system in the mathematical sense: dynamic, coupled, and sensitive to boundary conditions.
This is where systems thinking can help.
We need to approach beach management the way we would approach any large-scale engineered system: with humility, models, feedback, and above all, a willingness to listen to the data. This means:
Asking not just “What can we build?” but also “What will the system do in response?”
Understanding that “protecting the beach” doesn’t always mean building something hard and permanent.
Accepting that sometimes, doing less is smarter, or at least doing more flexibly.
Cyprus, with its incredible coastline and growing climate pressures, has an opportunity to lead here. To shift from reactive fixes to resilient coastal design. To think long-term. And to treat the shoreline not as a boundary to hold back, but as a partner to learn from.
PS1. This isn’t about pointing fingers. The municipality probably acted under pressure, trying to address a genuine problem. Also, the science of coastal protection is difficult, the timelines are long, and public patience is short.
PS2. Do you think I’ve made wrong assumptions and reached wrong conclusions? This is indeed very likely! Please contact me directly and I’d be happy to edit/correct my blog to that effect.