Big Brother Is Watching Benidorm Beachgoers As CCTV Monitors Footfall

BENIDORM City Council has taken a significant stride towards optimising beach management by implementing a cutting-edge CCTV monitoring system.

This initiative aims to gauge the daily influx of beachgoers, providing essential data on beach occupancy throughout the year.

The project, currently in its initial phase, has already been operational during the peak summer months of July and August along a stretch exceeding 1.5 kilometres of Poniente beach.

The mayor, Toni Pérez, officially unveiled the groundbreaking system on Friday, September 8, at the ‘Smart Office’ of the city council.

He said that this inaugural phase, entitled ‘Image and Data Analysis System in Areas of High Tourist Influx,’ is an integral component of the Tourism Sustainability Plan known as ‘Benidorm DTI + Seguro.’

This pioneering project required an investment of €150,000, positioning the city at the forefront of innovation in beach management.

The core functionality of this system revolves around meticulously monitoring the flow of people on the beaches.

It entailed the installation of 20 capacity control cameras strategically positioned along the Poniente beach stretch, spanning from Paseo de Colón to the Vela Blanca ravine, encompassing the intersections of Armada Española and Vicente Llorca Alós avenues, as outlined by Mayor Pérez.

These technologically advanced cameras are equipped with built-in object counting and control software, which operates anonymously to detect and track moving individuals until they exit the camera’s field of view.

In real-time, the cameras gather valuable data and present it on a dynamic ‘dashboard,’ where the precise count of people entering and departing the beach is continuously updated.

“This allows us to have a complete x-ray of the influx of people to the beaches, and therefore of their occupation, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year”, the Mayor stated.

At the moment, data is already available for the months of July and August, which resulted in 332,068 and 599,179 visits to the beach in the monitored section respectively.