Automatic Pool Covers in Calafell

Calafell has 2,802 pools on the Land Registry

According to the Land Registry there are 2,802 uncovered pools registered in Calafell, 74 more than in 2022, when there were 2,728: growth of 2.7% in four years. That figure makes the town the second of the 184 municipalities in the province of Tarragona, five pools behind El Vendrell (2,807) and ahead of Mont-roig del Camp (2,614), L’Ametlla de Mar (2,342), Cambrils (1,837), Tortosa (1,718), Cunit (1,582) and the provincial capital itself, Tarragona (1,533). The province adds up to 41,968 pools and has gained 1,825 since 2022, 4.5% more in four years. Catalonia as a whole has 204,648 pools spread across 936 municipalities: Barcelona leads with 108,322, Girona has 46,007, Tarragona 41,968 and Lleida 8,351.

To put that in context: Madrid is the first province in Spain with 147,555 pools, Alicante the second with 132,495 and Málaga records 83,789. Tarragona does not play in that league by volume, but Calafell does by concentration: one in every fifteen pools in the province sits inside this municipal boundary, around 137 per square kilometre, and close to nine for every 100 of its roughly 32,500 registered residents in 2025.

There is a historical reason why such a small municipality holds so many pools, and it is Segur de Calafell: it was founded in 1947 as a summer garden city on the Quinta de Sant Miquel de Segur estate, went on to become the largest and most populated urbanisation in Catalonia and today, turned into a permanent residential district, accounts for around half the town’s population. Almost thirty more estates grew up around it, with detached houses on their own plots dominating the hillside and the inland strip, and mid-rise blocks along the seafront. Growth over the last four years, 2.7%, falls short of the 4.5% across the province: that is what you would expect of a municipality that is already heavily built up.

A necessary word of warning about these numbers, so that nobody reads more into them than is there. The Land Registry census under-records: it is a floor, not a ceiling. There are pools that were never declared and others that appear late, so the real figure is higher than the published one. Nor does it distinguish a private pool from a communal one or from a campsite pool: those 2,802 are every body of water in the municipality, not 2,802 houses with a pool. And the data does not break down below municipal level: there is no split by district or by estate, so there is no saying how many are in Segur and how many in Platja de Calafell. When we divide up the area we do it by geography, never by pinning figures on a neighbourhood.

In practice, that profile — a family pool on its own plot — is the one a cover pays back fastest on. Closed, it cuts evaporation by between 70% and 80%: in an 8×4 metre pool, between 15,000 and 25,000 litres a year you do not have to replace. If there is a heat pump, consumption drops 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 withstands a 100 kg adult applied at any point, without breaking or coming away from its anchorings, built to the NF P90-308 standard, which is a French standard, not a European one. That does not make it a walkable surface or something to stand on, and nobody should walk on it. You can see the whole province on pool covers in Tarragona and the wider picture on pool covers in Catalonia.

Mestral, salt air and an empty house: what the Costa Dorada asks of a cover

Let us start with the wind, because it is the first thing that shapes an uncovered pool and here it has names of its own. The mestral, from the north-west, is the autumn and winter wind: it comes in dry and in hard gusts, and it is the one you notice most on the plot. The garbí or llebeig, from the south-west, is the sea breeze that gets up on summer afternoons and pushes the sea air inland. And the llevant, from the east, is the unpredictable one: when it blows hard it brings swell and rain. Translated into pool terms: mestral in the bad season and garbí on July and August afternoons.

And the wind counts for two reasons. Evaporation: after the sun, air running over the surface of the water is the great driver of water and heat loss, and a closed cover takes that surface out of the wind. And what the wind brings with it: with the cover on, leaves and grit stay on top and are rinsed off with a hose, instead of sinking to the bottom and into the filters.

The second thing is salt. Here the sea is in sight, or a step away, from almost anywhere in the municipality: four blue-flag beaches one after another — Platja de Calafell, l’Estany-Mas Mel, Segur de Calafell Llevant and Segur de Calafell Ponent — a straight, sandy coast with no cliffs, and Port Segur-Calafell, opened in 2005, with 525 berths and room for boats up to 22 metres. That salt-laden breeze is the reason the whole structure, the shaft, the brackets and the fixings are AISI 316L stainless steel, and the reason we never use aluminium. Maintenance is next to nothing: rinse the slats, shaft and brackets with fresh water after several days of onshore wind. There are no rails or guides to grease, because the slats float on the water.

The third is water coming down all at once. Calafell has no river: what it has is a network of torrents running from the interior down to the sea. The main one is the torrent de la Corbatera — which everyone here pronounces «Cobertera» — which collects most of the municipality’s catchment and reaches the sea south of Calafell Poble after taking in the torrent de Montpaó on its left bank; further east are the Casa Nova and the Casa Vella de Segur torrents, which join near the beach, and on the final stretch l’Estany Llarg opens out. For a pool that means heavy rainfall does not arrive as clean water, but dragging soil, leaves and grit down off the hillside. With the pool covered, all of that stays on top of the slats.

The fourth is what falls into the water the rest of the year: leaves, twigs, pollen and the sand that blows up from the beach every time the wind comes off the sea. A closed cover is not only safety and savings; day to day, it is what keeps the bottom clean and takes the load off the filter.

And the fifth is the household calendar: with a great deal of seasonal housing in Segur and in the estates, many pools go half the season with nobody in front of them, and a cover leaves the pool covered and closed to access. With a safety warning we always repeat: it has no alarm and no obstacle sensors, it detects nothing and it does not stop on its own, so you operate it with the pool in sight and nothing on top of it.

With all that in mind, the choice of slat is not a matter of taste, but neither is it a question of strength: PVC and polycarbonate are equally strong and the width of the pool does not dictate the slat. What changes is light and heat. PVC is opaque, it lets no light through to the water — which holds algae back — and it keeps the heat the water has gathered; it is made in four shades: white, beige, grey and blue. Solar polycarbonate has a dark underside, takes in the sun and warms the water, 6 or 7 °C during the day at no running cost, and comes in seven shades: blue, royal blue, platinum, green, smoke, royal black and royal grey. Transparent slats let you see the pool and look their best on pools with a sea view, with three finishes: transparent, platinum and blue. We set it all out, with sections and weights, in slat types, and the roller systems in cover models. What we do not do, so there is no misunderstanding, is walk-on covers, telescopic covers, enclosures, domes, winter debris covers or thermal blankets: only automatic slatted covers, and since 2005.