The Infrastructure Ministry has said (TMID, 2 December) that a bay should remain linked to its valley inland because a bay is regenerated not by the sea, as many believe, but by the land, from the sediment which flows from valleys into the sea.

I am not one knowledgeable enough to counter this, but what I have seen does seem to contradict this statement.

I refer to Gnejna Bay. Deep and wide ditches leading to the sea are gouged in the sandy beach every time there is a huge rainfall, which flows violently from the valley at the back, into the sea. The ditches truly make a massacre of the sandy beach, which hardly remains usable.

But then, the first time the wind blows wildly from the north west, to which Gnejna Bay is exposed, the beach is restored, the sand returns, carried in by the violent waves, and the gouged ditches fill up, so that the beach becomes the smooth plain of sand that it is in summer.

In this case it is surely the sea that regenerates the beach, not the valley.

C. Galea

Rabat