Barcelona reduces beach capacity by 15% to lower risk of infection

Barcelona City Council has taken the decision to reduce the capacity of the city's beaches by 15% in order to lower the risk of Covid-19 infection.

Other councils in the metropolitan area will also lower their capacities, with the reduction depending on each local administration.

The 15% reduction that will apply in Barcelona represents a decrease in the capacity of the city's beaches of 8,000 people.

Barcelona councilor Eloi Badia explained that they decided against a bigger reduction so that there would be no "exodus" to other municipalities, and to prevent excessive queuing at beach entry points.

Badia also asked people not to spend the whole day at the beach.

The Catalan capital's beaches are busiest on Fridays and at the weekends between 4pm and 8pm. Local police, the Guàrdia Urbana, have had to restrict access to five or six of the city's beaches at the weekends due to overcrowding.

The overall capacity of 38,000 people has not been reached, however, due to the uneven distribution of beachgoers across the city's beaches.

The council calculates the free space available and the capacity of each beach in real-time with the use of video sensors that record the volume of people.

This information is translated into a 'traffic light' system for each beach that can be consulted on the City Council's website in real-time (along with the quality of the water) and indicates whether the capacity level is low, medium, high, or very high.