Automatic pool covers in Alfàs del Pi and Albir

L'Alfàs del Pi has 2,856 pools on the Catastro register

According to the Catastro there are 2,856 open-air pools on record in the municipality of l'Alfàs del Pi, 69 more than in 2022. The province of Alicante as a whole adds up to 132,495 pools spread across 141 municipalities and has gained 6,360 since 2022, 5.0 % more, which makes it the second province in Spain by registered pools, behind only Madrid (147,555). The provincial average works out at some 940 pools per municipality: l'Alfàs triples that average in an area of barely 19.26 km².

But the figure that really explains l'Alfàs del Pi is the comparison with its neighbour to the south. Benidorm, right next door to l'Alfàs and with a far larger population, has only 1,163 pools on record: fewer than half as many as l'Alfàs. It is not a mistake in the Catastro, it is town planning. In the nineteen-sixties Benidorm chose the vertical city, concentrating its building rights in apartment towers where thousands of residents share one communal body of water, or none at all. L'Alfàs del Pi did the opposite: low-density horizontal urbanisations, the detached house on its own plot, a garden of pines, almonds and orange trees. And a plot like that almost always ends up with a pool. In the same comarca, Altea has 2,890 pools on record, La Nucía 2,542 and Finestrat 1,471.

Looked at across the province as a whole, the ranking is headed by Jávea / Xàbia with 9,317 pools, followed by Orihuela (7,375), Dénia (5,175), Torrevieja (4,931), Teulada-Moraira (4,887), the city of Alicante (4,866), Calpe (4,744) and Benissa (4,120). L'Alfàs del Pi comes in just behind Altea with its 2,856, ahead of La Nucía and of Benitachell (2,000). In other words: a small municipality of 19.26 km², placed high in the provincial pool ranking ahead of far larger areas. That only happens where the single-family house is the dominant model.

A necessary warning about these numbers, so that nobody reads more into them than is there. The Catastro census under-records: it is a floor, not a ceiling. Some pools were never declared, others are entered late and small ones never make it onto the register at all, so the real figure is higher than the published one. The Catastro does not separate the private pool from the communal one, from a hotel's or from a club's either: the 2,856 in l'Alfàs are all the bodies of water registered in the municipality, not 2,856 houses with a pool. And the figure does not go below municipality level: there is no official breakdown by centre or by urbanisation, so it cannot be said how many are in l'Albir and how many in the town centre, nor how many in Escandinavia or in El Cautivador. When we divide the area up by urbanisation we do it by geography and by our own work, never by attributing figures to a neighbourhood.

In practice, that profile of a family pool on its own plot is the one that gets most out of a cover, and the argument here is not an aesthetic one. A closed slatted cover cuts evaporation by between 70 % and 80 %: in an 8 × 4 metre pool that is between 15,000 and 25,000 litres a year you do not have to replace, and in an area where it does not rain for most of the year and water is paid for, that is no small detail. If there is a heat pump, the system's consumption falls by between 50 % and 60 %, and with solar polycarbonate slats the water gains 6 or 7 °C during the day at no running cost. The other reason people call us is safety: closed, the slats form a continuous surface that keeps anyone out of the water and holds 100 kg as required by NF P90-308, which is a French standard, not a European one. It is worth saying plainly: that does not make it walkable or trafficable, and nobody should get on top of it. You can see the whole province on our page for pool covers in Alicante.

Salt, pine woods and gota fría: what l'Albir asks of a cover

The climate of l'Alfàs del Pi is its best selling point and, at the same time, what asks most of a cover. It is a very steady Mediterranean one, with close to 300 days of sun a year, mild winters and a sea that acts as a thermostat: the water of the Mediterranean moves roughly between 20 and 28 °C from June to October and is slow to cool down in autumn. That is why people here eat out on the terrace in November, and why the pool is not a piece of August furniture: it is part of the house for almost the whole year.

For a pool that means the swimming season is genuinely long and that a cover earns its keep over more months of the year than almost anywhere else in Spain. But it also means a great many hours of radiation on the slats. A badly chosen slat fades and turns brittle within a few summers, above all on the south-facing terraces of the hillside developments, with the sea in front and nothing to cast any shade. We work with profiles stabilised against ultraviolet light and we study the real orientation of each pool before recommending a finish and a colour.

The second thing is salt. The Racó de l'Albir is a shingle beach open to the Mediterranean and sheltered by the Punta Bombarda, and behind it rise the cliffs of the Serra Gelada, the first land-and-sea nature park in the Comunitat Valenciana; the Albir lighthouse, at the end of the Camí Vell del Far, hangs literally over the sea. That salt breeze is the reason the whole structure, the shaft, the supports and every bolt are AISI 316L stainless steel and not some other material, and the reason we never use aluminium. The upkeep, on the other hand, is next to nothing: rinse the slats, the shaft and the supports with fresh water, above all after several days of sea wind. There are no rails or guides to clean or grease, because the slats float on the water.

The third thing is the dirt off the plants, which here never stops. The developments of l'Alfàs were built among pine woods, almond trees and terraces of orange and lemon trees, and that garden everybody likes so much is the very thing that fills the pool: pine needles, cones, dry leaves and orange blossom end up in the water every time the wind blows off the land. With the cover closed that dirt stays on top and comes off with a hose. And then there is autumn: in the Marina Baixa it rains little and badly, the sky is clear for most of the year and then September and October deliver the rainfall all at once, in gota fría episodes that can drop in a few hours what has not fallen in months. That water washes soil and grit off the hillside and into the pool, and that is exactly when a closed cover shows its worth.

And safety counts, which is the other real reason people call us: closed, the cover is a sheet of rigid slats floating on the water and covering the whole pool — a physical barrier against a fall, not simply a saving on cleaning. In a municipality with so many older residents living in a villa with a pool, that argument carries as much weight as the grandchildren who come over in the holidays. With one warning we always repeat, mind: the cover carries no alarm and no obstacle sensors. It detects nothing and it does not stop by itself. Whoever operates it has to watch the water, and pulling the slats by hand or moving them with something on top damages the mechanism without warning.

With all that, choosing a slat in l'Alfàs is not a matter of taste. PVC works well in the more sheltered pools of the town centre and the inland developments; solar polycarbonate puts those clear days to work, gaining temperature and stretching the season at the hillside villas; the clear slat looks best in pools with views over the sea and the Serra Gelada, of which there are many here. We explain all of it, with sections and weights, on our slat types page, and the shaft systems on cover models. What we do not do, so there is no misunderstanding, is walk-on covers, telescopic covers, pool enclosures, domes, winter tarpaulins or thermal blankets: only automatic slatted covers, and since 2005.