Capacidade de suporte recreacional das falésias de Canoa Quebrada - Ceará.

Abstract

East coast of Ceará presents an extensive coastlines and exuberant landscapes. One of them has become widely known for its steep walls of sand and for attracting thousands of tourists. Canoa Quebrada beach is mostly known for its cliffs, and since 1988 is considered an Environmental Protected Area (APA). The number of visitors during the high season causes negative impacts to the cliffs, with erosion and soil compaction. The usage of trails, sculpted inside the gullies by the action of wind and rain, as access for the beach, is common. Nevertheless, there were no studies that quantify the impact of the uses of these trails. This work has as objective estimate the recreational load capacity main of trails in the cliffs. Cifuentes (1992) developed the methodology used in this work, which allows the integration and quantification of physical and biotic factors and the infrastructure by calculating the physical, real and recreational load capacity. The results pointed to several areas of erosion and inappropriate urban occupation, with points in the cliffs with high degree of erosion and decharacterization, and points where property speculation overcame the environmental preservation. The physical load capacity resulted in 144.33 meters/user, the recreational load capacity resulted in 2.1 user/m2/day or 766.5 user/m2/year. A high value compared with studies of the same magnitude carried out by Pinheiro (2009) at the monument of the cliffs of Beberibe-CE, where he obtained a result of density in the maze of the sector of 0.40 individuals/m²/day. It is expected that this work may contribute to the environmental management of the protected area and to the creation of a management plan of the APA, providing improvements to the cliffs conservation.