Automatic pool covers in Altea

Altea has 2,890 pools on the Catastro register

According to the Catastro there are 2,890 open-air pools on record in the municipality of Altea, 62 more than in 2022, growth of 2.2 % in four years. The province of Alicante as a whole has 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: Altea has three times that, in an area of 34.43 km², a little over 83 pools per square kilometre.

The figure is worth comparing before it is used, and the most telling comparison is the one close to home. Altea has more registered pools than any other municipality in the Marina Baixa, ahead of L'Alfàs del Pi (2,856), La Nucía (2,542) and Finestrat (1,471). And ahead, above all, of Benidorm: the tourist capital of the comarca, with 77,221 registered inhabitants against Altea's 24,592, has only 1,163 pools on record. Which is to say that Altea has two and a half times the pools of Benidorm on a third of its population. Outside the comarca, the figures rise wherever the plots do. The municipality with the most registered pools in the whole province is Jávea / Xàbia, with 9,317. And going up into the Marina Alta, the municipalities that live off the detached house run very high figures indeed: Dénia (5,175), Teulada-Moraira (4,887), Calpe (4,744) and Benissa (4,120). Weighing heavily too, down in the south of the province, are Orihuela (7,375) and Torrevieja (4,931), as well as the city of Alicante itself (4,866).

That so small a municipality should hold so many pools is no accident, and here the explanation is half planning and half geography. Altea never played Benidorm's game: the old town was protected, the seafront was kept low and growth went up the hillside in the shape of large plots with detached houses, first around the bay and at Cap Blanc, later at Galera de las Palmeras, at Sierra de Altea and at Altea Hills, by then with the Sierra de Bernia behind. The colony of artists that settled in the old town from the nineteen-sixties onwards and the European second home that came afterwards bought the same thing: a house with a garden, views over the bay and a pool of its own. Fifty years on, the result is a mature stock of private pools, built in phases, to dimensions that rarely match a catalogue. Which is exactly the job we are asked for most: covering a pool that already exists.

A necessary warning about these numbers, so that nobody reads more into them than is there. The Catastro register 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 2,890 in Altea are all the registered bodies of water in the municipality, not 2,890 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 Altea la Vella, how many at Altea Hills or how many at Galera de las Palmeras. When we divide the area up by district 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 on a coast where the rain falls on just a few days in autumn 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, sun and gota fría: what Altea asks of a cover

Altea's climate is its best selling point and, at the same time, what asks most of a cover. It is a very steady Mediterranean one, with mild winters and long summers, an annual average temperature of around 18 °C and little rainfall, some 500 mm a year and most of it concentrated in autumn. The open bay and the screen of mountains formed by the Sierra de Bernia to the north and the Serra Gelada to the south leave a temperate corner where the swimming season genuinely stretches out.

For a pool that means 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- and south-east-facing terraces of Sierra de Altea, of Altea Hills or of the plots that look out over the bay from Cap Blanc. 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. Altea has a little over six kilometres of shoreline and almost all of its housing is in sight of the sea: from La Roda beach and the mouth of the Algar river at L'Espigó, by way of Cap Negret, L'Olla and Cap Blanc, to the rocky cove of La Solsida, La Galera, and the Mascarat stretch at the foot of the Morro de Toix. 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 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. In a municipality with so much slope, that water comes down the hillside and washes soil, grit and everything in its path into the pool; it is no accident that the Mascarat ravine and the Algar river itself are the two scars the water has left on this municipality. And for the rest of the year it is the pine woods and the terraces that do the dirtying: pine needles, almond blossom and dust 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, the bottom of the pool stays clean and the filtration plant works less. It counts for a great deal in an area where many owners leave the house shut up for half the season.

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. 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 Altea is not a matter of taste. PVC works well in the more sheltered pools of the old town, of l'Horta and of Altea la Vella; 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 a view over the bay and the Peñón de Ifach across the water, 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.