Coastal areas also shrink: main determinants for the case of Southern Portugal

Portugal has facing a process of population displacement from the rural areas to major cities, commonly located along the Atlantic coast. As in the rest of Portugal, the Algarve registered during the 1960s the exodus from the rural areas, mainly to the Meridional Coast due the development of the touristic activity. Under this framework, we might be tempted to think that the coastal area of Algarve as an overall is demographically expanding. Although in general terms coastal municipalities have being facing a continued population growth, there is however some degraded areas, left abandoned and losing population. This analysis is relevant because problem recognition is required in order to implement policies to correct these phenomena. In order to find the determinants of population loss in some sub-areas of the Algarve Coast, panel data regressions were estimated, using for the time dimension the Census data for 1991 and 2001 years, and for the cross-section dimension 20 shrinking coastal territory sections. The major reasons for the existence of sub-areas shrinking in the Coast of Algarve are the absence of any economic activity in those places as well as the deindustrialization process. In order to deal with it some local governments good practices are shown by combining the creation of attractive conditions for the placement of new economic activities with strategies that cope historical and aesthetic concerns