Smart Tourism & Crowd Monitoring: How La Unión Built its “Digital Brain”
In the world of Smart Cities, there are two types of managers: those who accumulate data and those who transform the city with it.
The City Council of La Unión (Murcia) has officially joined the second group. By implementing Libelium’s IoT technology, the municipality has transitioned from visual estimations to evidence-based urban management, drastically optimizing tourist mobility and local resources.
The Challenge: Managing Tourism Success with Data
La Unión is a unique cultural hub, defined by its mining heritage and the world-renowned Festival del Cante de las Minas, which attracts over 30,000 visitors annually.
As a premier Smart Tourism Destination, this constant influx raised critical questions for the administration:
- How to size cleaning and security services during massive events without overstretching budgets?
- How does visitor flow influence local commerce?
- How to reduce the carbon footprint and the environmental impact of tourism?
The goal wasn’t just installing IoT sensors, but breaking down information silos to provide a scalable tool for future urban challenges.
Located between the beaches of the Mar Menor and the Mediterranean Sea, La Unión is one of Spain’s favorite tourist destinations. The aforementioned festival annually attracts more than 30,000 people, establishing itself as the world epicenter of flamenco. And its mining past can be visited at the Liceo de los Obreros, built in 1901 and converted into a Mining Museum, and the La Unión Mining Park, with 50,000 square meters where you can visit an old underground mine and ride a mining train.
It is clear that they required assistance from crowd monitoring professional solution.
The Solution: A Data-Driven (and Ethical) System
Framed within the SmartRegion initiative—co-financed by EU FEDER funds and the Region of Murcia—the strategy relies on four pillars of digital transformation:
1. SmartSpot Crowd nodes for affluence
Six strategic nodes were deployed (City Hall, Mining Park, Archaeological Museum). Unlike intrusive video surveillance, our crowd monitoring solutions capture WiFi and Bluetooth signals to detect pedestrian flow patterns.
- Privacy as a Priority: Information is encrypted and anonymized at the source. We comply with GDPR (RGPD) and ENS (High Level), ensuring data serves the citizen without compromising privacy.
2. iris360: The command center
The sensor is the means; iris360 is the end. This intelligence platform converts raw data into heat maps, affluence indicators, and business dashboards. Using Machine Learning, the City Council can:
- Measure real-time visitor affluence.
- Identify patterns of urban space use.
- Simulate mobility scenarios before executing street closures or traffic plans.
3. Total interoperability (FIWARE)
We avoid “walled gardens.” All of La Unión’s infrastructure uses FIWARE standards, allowing data to flow seamlessly to regional platforms. This ensures scalability: today it’s mobility; tomorrow it can be air quality or noise monitoring without rebuilding the foundation.
4. A layer-by-layer digital twin.
A visualization layer allows municipal managers to interact with a Digital Twin of the city. This interface facilitates proactive management and “datacracy”—where every decision is backed by real-time analytics.
- Testing scenarios without breaking anything: A digital twin allows city managers to implement measures or ideas and see how they evolve in the virtual environment. The more data, the better information; and the more information, the more datacracy.
The Results: Efficiency Measured in Numbers
Digitalization is, above all, a tool for savings. The data speaks for itself:
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) | Result |
Fuel Consumption | 11% Reduction (Fleet & route optimization) |
Operational Productivity | 17% Improvement (Waste collection & services) |
Local Economic Impact | Optimized commercial campaigns based on real visitor behavior |
This project, co-financed by the FEDER Funds (60%) and the CARM (40%), demonstrates that digital transformation is not a question of city size, but of political vision. La Unión is no longer just a benchmark in mining culture; it is now the mirror where municipalities aspiring to governance based on transparency and efficiency should look.
Other success stories of people affluence
Llanes: Intelligent coastal management
- Challenge: In the Asturian municipality of Llanes, the main challenge was to guarantee security and coexistence on its beaches and promenades during high season peaks.
- Solution: Thanks to the deployment of high-precision counting sensors and a visual management platform, the city council managed to transform uncertainty into actionable data.
- Result: The result has been much more fluid communication with visitors and a drastic reduction in conflicts due to overcapacity, allowing tourism and local well-being to walk hand in hand.
Zaragoza: Digitalizing the commercial heartbeat
- Challenge: In Zaragoza, the focus was on the digitalization of the customer journey in one of its most critical commercial arteries.
- Solution: By using AI algorithms and flow monitoring devices, we not only managed to trace the entry and exit routes of pedestrians, but we also integrated sustainability variables such as air quality and noise.
- Result: This 360° vision allows the municipality to make decisions based on real data to improve both the shopping experience and the environmental health of the urban environment.
Starlite: Efficiency and security in the "backstage"
- Challenge: The operational complexity of the Starlite festival demanded a solution capable of optimizing space and profitability in real time.
- Solution: We implemented a network of IoT devices integrated directly with the festival app, using algorithmic modeling to manage the affluence of people between stages and dining areas.
- Result: This technology not only raised safety standards but also allowed for much more efficient bar management, maximizing the event’s profitability through understanding audience behavior.
Gandía: A DTI model for tourist mobility
- Challenge: The Gandía project is a clear example of how Intelligent Tourist Destination (DTI) technology can structure a municipality.
- Solution: We deployed an advanced analytics platform and a sensor network to perform affluence tracking from the historic center to the port.
- Result: This “turnkey” project has allowed the city council to accurately understand how tourists move through its territory, facilitating much more strategic flow management oriented towards improving pedestrian mobility.
Nueva York: Crowd monitoring in the subway
- Challenge: Implement a solution that would allow real-time monitoring of the NYC subway passenger flow, visualization of their movement patterns, and generation of heat maps to make data-driven decisions.
- Solution: Smart Crowd solution + iris360 provides real-time information on crowding levels for operational purposes (passenger access management, alerts) and long-term trend analysis to improve planning and demand forecasting.
- Result: The solution replaces manual counts, generating an estimated savings of $3,300 per day. It provides 24/7 visibility with zero human intervention, allowing staff to focus on higher-value tasks.
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