“Memoria ecológica” de un paisaje perdido. Historia de la resignificación de La Manga del Mar Menor (1969-1975)

This essay deals with a proposal that aims to address the era of the touristic francoist developmentalism in La Manga del Mar Menor between 1969 and 1975. The ending years of the francoist regime meant a period of a visible opening in terms of tourist arrivals to Spain, so much that it’s correct to state that the national economy disovovered tourism as a key sector for development. In this context, it is necessary to understand the starting point of this essay in the approval of the Coastal Law of April 1969, which sought to sort the process of exploitation of a new source of wealth, the coast, and above all, its landscape.The landscape of La Manga has been redefined due to an uncontrolled urban impulse, as a result of it being resignificated during the last fifty years, causing the destruction of a place of enjoyment, recreation, economy and popular biodiversity, transforming it into a space for collective and “ecological” memory. Thus, the axis of this investigation resides in the fact that, due to the metamorphosis and devastation of traditional spaces such as La Manga del Mar Menor in this case, these spaces act like “places of memory” where society’s culture converge, and they are in danger of becoming places of oblivion, to consequently mutate into “non-places”, as a result of urbanistic recklessness.