Conclusions
Coastal resources management is a great challenge for both tourism planners and coastal managers and the issue of ascertaining the optimum usage levels of resources is a great task to be performed. As tourism flows are ever growing, the probability of increasing the rate of environmental hazards is also increasing and sustainable approaches need to be implemented. Among several approaches, carrying capacity assessment remains one of the most useful and applied techniques. At Praia de Faro, the physical carrying capacity is reported as 1491e2982, which contradicts the values of 72,000 (scenario 1) and 36,000 (scenario 2) reported on page 6. Though, these values should not be seen as the number of people that the beach can accommodate as a permanent fix of these huge numbers of visits at one time would be a disaster. Alternatively, the socio-cultural carrying capacity was estimated at 305 and 608 beach users. However, defining the optimum number of beach users a beach can support is not the end and there is a need of applying other frameworks that based on the upper limits of acceptance can help in the process of identifying the load or the level of impact that the beach will sustain and codes of conduct that beach users should follow.