No More Beach Beds, Only Seagrass Sofas!

April 2025

Poster campaign: 30 Posters

At the beginning of the summer season, when Aegina has its busiest period of visitors to the island, one of the first things we see is the establishment of beach bars and beach beds being set up on local beaches. There are regulations as to how many beach beds can be placed on each beach, and we can even see this using a government app (https://minfin.gov.gr/paraliagiaolous/my-coast-app/), but often these rules are ignored.

Another major problem of the beach bars is that they remove the seagrass that protects the coastline throughout the winter months. This seagrass is crucial for the coastline as it helps anchor the sand, but also provides important habitat for shoreline animals. 

Vessel created an awareness-raising poster that we placed in key locations along the coastline of Aegina, often near beach bars, to ask them to consider their use of the beaches and to find an equilibrium between the beach beds and the natural coastline with its existing seagrass.

As you can imagine, many posters were ripped down. But in one location, at a community-organised beach in Aeginitissa, the poster remained in place all season, and we noticed a lot of respect for the message from the local citizens. For us, this is a real result, and we hope to build on this in the years to come.