Who sees the sea? Sea-view potential by façade and floor from cadastral LoD1 models on the Costa del Sol
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Working paper, version r120 of 10 November 2026. Views are among the most valued and least measured attributes of a home. We present an open-data method that estimates the sea-view potential of every free façade of every residential building at three floors (ground, middle and top; other floors take the nearest of them), from cadastral footprints with floor counts and a national terrain model. Run for 158,060 buildings of 21 municipalities on Spain's Costa del Sol in under an hour on two cores, it finds that 52 % of buildings see some sea from their top floor and 36 % have an open view (20° or more). Traced over a LiDAR surface in a pilot, scores agree with the model's inside cadastral footprints (96.7 % of viewpoints in the same class at 20°), but structures the cadastre does not record lower the sea seen from the top floor by 6.1–9.0° on average. Against the photographs of 93 homes for sale, labelled blind by AI models of two developers with ties decided by the author, the score has an AUC of 0.80 (95 % CI 0.70–0.89; 0.81 against the first-round labels); at 20° it is sensitive (0.90) but not specific (0.45). Dwelling figures depend on how dwellings are allocated to façades and floors: 42 % of dwellings are on a floor with open-view potential under the main rule, and 12–45 % across the allocation, geometry and vegetation scenarios tested. As an application, higher-income census sections tend to have more modelled view potential within municipalities, with uncertain size and fragile inference (about two effective clusters); on terrain alone the difference largely disappears. Code and façade-level data reproduce the main results. The article, with its figures and how to cite it: https://casas.es/en/research/who-sees-the-sea Data and code: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24106387 The Costa del Sol on CASAS.ES: https://casas.es/malaga/costa-del-sol-comarca/ How CASAS.ES computes its figures: https://casas.es/en/methodology
Author: Rojo, Gabriel
Language: English
Subfield: Building and Construction
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225748870
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