Beach Bars at Villa Gesell

Change at Home

During 2006, the City of Villa Gesell began a plan of total reconstruction of its seaside front and, with great effort, it attained to recover more than 60.000 square meters of beaches of sand and dunes. For that purpose, the old concrete beach bars (those which have marked an era) were completely dismantled and new ones sharing aesthetics, building materials and the same logical performance, were erected.

These new beach bars were built under IRAM 42100 regulations, and every unit has been built on wooden piles to lessen the environmental impact that has been reducing the size of beaches at Gesell year after year. The same is happening in the rest of the Atlantic coast.

On the other side, and for those who prefer Villa Gesell to rest, each beach has private toilettes, tents and restaurants which undoubtedly offer a better service.

The benefit is that these physical modifications come together with a change in the perception of the environment impact issue. Thus, the care and order of the beaches in particular and the environment in general are widely and explicitly promoted. Those immense beaches full of dunes discovered by Carlos Gesell are trying to be once more what they used to be long ago, or at least, to get as near as possible to that sand paradise which man would colonize later on with pine trees, eucalyptus, cypresses and aromos (a type of acacia).


Everyone's Footbridge

The beach reconstruction plan has also brought along a cute one-and-a-half-kilometer-long wooden pedestrian promenade which links all the beaches. This particular promenade is now the new icon of the city and the gathering point in the mornings for those who like to go for a walk by the sea. It is an invitation for visitors and locals to make the sea a place to meet.

The idea is that men, women and children walk through the wooden footbridge like models exhibiting their swimwear during the new summer season. Bicycles and neighbors with their dogs cheer and give life to this new already successful public area.

Years go by, entire decades pass, and Villa Gesell is still “Gesell”. Perhaps this is so because its dwellers know how to choose the right moment to recycle. Sometimes, a subtle facelift makes us to be remembered again (in this case thanks to the footbridge and the beach bars) and find ourselves face to face with the ecological philosophy, the passing of time.