Automatic pool covers in Benitachell

Benitachell has 2,000 pools on the Catastro register

According to the Catastro there are 2,000 open-air pools on record in the municipality of El Poble Nou de Benitatxell, 68 more than in 2022, growth of 3.5 % 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: Benitachell has more than twice that, in an area of only 12.65 km².

The figure is worth comparing before it is used, and the provincial ranking is headed by a neighbour. Jávea / Xàbia, which borders Benitachell to the north, has more pools than any other municipality in Alicante: 9,317. Behind it come 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); further down are Altea (2,890), l'Alfàs del Pi (2,856) and La Nucía (2,542). And there Benitachell appears with its 2,000, ahead of Finestrat (1,471) and, above all, ahead of Benidorm, which has only 1,163. That contrast explains the whole municipality: Benidorm, with fifteen times as many inhabitants as Benitachell, has barely 1,163 pools on record — little more than half the number here — because there the housing is the apartment tower and here it is the villa on its own plot.

That so small a municipality should hold so many pools has a purely physical explanation. Benitachell has no buildable seafront: its two kilometres of coast are cliff more than a hundred metres high, with Cala del Moraig, Cala dels Testos and Cala del Llebeig at the foot of it, reachable on foot but without a metre of promenade on which to put up blocks of flats. With no buildable seafront, growth went to the hillside and to the plot: Cumbre del Sol on the cliff of the Puig de la Llorença, and Les Fonts, La Joya, Los Molinos, Alcassar, Golden Valley, Vista Montaña and Racó de Nadal between the town and the sea. Where another stretch of coast would have one building with a hundred flats, here there are twenty plots with a villa, a garden and a private pool. And the arithmetic bears it out: more than 158 pools per square kilometre of municipal area.

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 residential complex with several bodies of water either: the 2,000 in Benitachell are all the pools registered in the municipality, not 2,000 houses with a pool. And the figure does not go below municipality level: there is no official breakdown by urbanisation, so it cannot be said how many are in Cumbre del Sol and how many in the old town, nor how many in Les Fonts or in La Joya. When we divide the area up by urbanisation we do it by geography and by our own work, never by attributing figures to a sector.

In practice, that profile of a villa 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 a municipality 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 in line with 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 the cliff asks of a cover

Benitachell'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 around 300 days of sun a year, mild winters and a sea that acts as a thermostat: the Mediterranean gets close to 25 °C at the height of summer and is slow to cool down in autumn. That is not brochure copy: it is the same reason these hillsides were planted with muscatel grapes for raisins for generations, the trade that left behind the riuraus and the windmills that still give one of the urbanisations its name.

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 Cumbre del Sol terraces facing south and south-west, which is precisely the aspect the plots with a view are after. 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, and here the case is an extreme one. A pool on the edge of the cliff, a hundred metres above the water and with nothing standing between it and the open sea, gets salt breeze almost all year round; on days of levante wind the salt is carried in suspension as far as the centre of the town, two kilometres inland. That 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 Alta 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 of hillsides and ravines like this one — the Barranc del Vicari i de l'Infern runs straight down towards the coast — that water washes soil, grit and everything else in its path into the pool. For the rest of the year it is the pine woods and the scrub that do the dirtying: needles and cones 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 a municipality where so 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 that floats on the water and covers 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 Benitachell is not a matter of taste. PVC works well in the more sheltered pools of the old town and the inland urbanisations; 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 that look out over the sea, which here is nearly all of them. 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.