Automatic pool covers in Calonge i Sant Antoni

Calonge i Sant Antoni has 2,623 pools on the Land Registry

According to the Land Registry there are 2,623 uncovered pools registered in Calonge i Sant Antoni, 208 more than in 2022, when there were 2,415: 8.6% growth in four years. That puts the municipality third of the 221 municipalities in the province of Girona, behind Castelló d’Empúries (3,066) and Lloret de Mar (2,862), and ahead of L’Escala (2,159), Begur (2,039), Roses (1,850), Platja d’Aro (1,517) and Palafrugell (1,466). The province of Girona adds up to 46,007 pools and has gained 3,840 since 2022, 9.1% more: it is the fastest-growing Catalan province. Across Catalonia there are 204,648 pools in 936 municipalities, with Barcelona in front (108,322) and Girona second.

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. Girona does not play in that league on volume, but it does on concentration: Calonge i Sant Antoni has more than twelve times the provincial average per municipality within 33.57 km², some 78 pools per square kilometre, and around 21 registered pools for every 100 of its 12,268 inhabitants.

That a medium-sized municipality should hold so many pools is no accident, and the explanation sits in the Town Council’s own documents. The Pla Local d’Habitatge 2021-2026 breaks residential urban land down by type: detached single-family housing takes up 4,010,819 m², 76.15% of the residential land and 47.00% of the floor space; detached multi-family housing accounts for just 9.86% of the land and the old centre for 4.04%. This is a municipality of individual plots, not of blocks, and the figure cannot be extrapolated to its neighbours. Then there is how the houses are used: 67% of the homes are not a main residence — 8,544, of which 6,475 are listed as second homes — against 53% in the comarca and 39% in Palamós; the only comparable case the report itself cites is Platja d’Aro, at 70%.

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 undeclared pools and others that appear late, so the real figure is higher than the published one. The Land Registry also draws no distinction between a private pool, a communal one and a campsite pool: those 2,623 are every body of water in the municipality, not 2,623 houses with a pool. And the figure does not go below municipal level: there is no breakdown by village or by estate, so there is no saying how many are in Sant Antoni and how many in the vila. When we divide the area up we do it by geography and by our own work, never by attributing figures to one neighbourhood.

In practice, that profile — a family pool on its own plot — is the one a cover pays back fastest. Closed, it cuts evaporation by between 70% and 80%: in an 8×4 metre pool, 15,000 to 25,000 litres a year you do not have to replace. If there is a heat pump, 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 carries 100 kg, built to the NF P90-308 standard, a French standard, not a European one. That does not make it a walkable surface, and nobody should walk on it. You can see the whole province at pool covers in Girona and the region as a whole at pool covers in Catalonia.

Wind, salt and a house shut up: what the Costa Brava asks of a cover

Let us start with the wind, because on the Costa Brava it is the first thing that comes up in any conversation. The tramuntana shapes life on this coast, but we are not going to publish how many days it blows in Calonge i Sant Antoni, or how hard: we have no measured figure for this municipality and we would rather not invent one. What is documented is the lie of the land, which is what matters for a pool: the municipality occupies the south-eastern end of the massif of les Gavarres, with the muntanya de la Ganga closing it off to the north and Can Mont to the north-west, and its front opens onto the badia de Palamós. Every plot has its own exposure, depending on where it sits on the hillside and which way it faces, and a provincial average will not settle that: we look at it at your house on the day of the visit, which is done by our Barcelona team. And the wind counts for two reasons. Evaporation: after the sun, the air 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 hosed off, instead of sinking to the bottom and into the filters.

The second thing is the salt. Here the coast is in view from almost everywhere: the two kilometres of sand at Sant Antoni and Es Monestrí, Torre Valentina on the other side of the riera — with the sixteenth-century watchtower that gives it its name — and, to the south, Can Cristus, Ses Torretes, Roques Planes and Cala Belladona. That salt-laden breeze is why the whole structure, the shaft, the brackets and the fittings are AISI 316L stainless steel, and why we never use aluminium. Maintenance is next to nothing: rinse the slats, the shaft and the brackets with fresh water. There are no rails or guides to grease, because the slats float on the water.

The third is the rain, which here is not steady. There is no weather station inside the municipality, and we are not going to publish an average rainfall we cannot back with a series measured here. What any neighbour will describe is the pattern: long spells when it barely rains, and episodes that come down all at once and wash soil off the hillside into the riera de Calonge. For a pool that means two things: every litre in the pool counts when it is not raining, and it pays to have the water covered when dirty water is coming down off the slope.

The fourth is what lands in the pool the rest of the year. A good part of the non-developable land is protected woodland: les Gavarres has been designated an Espai d’Interès Natural since December 1992, with 28,672 hectares across the massif as a whole, and is included in the PEIN and in the Xarxa Natura 2000; in this municipality the protection falls to the north-west, Can Mont, and to the north, la Ganga. Having the woods above you is part of what the plot is worth, and the reason the bottom of the pool gets dirty: leaves, twigs and pollen end up in the water every time the wind blows off the land.

And the fifth is the household calendar: with 67% of the homes not in main use, many pools spend half the season with nobody in front of them, and a cover leaves the pool covered and closed to access. With one safety warning: it has no alarm and no obstacle sensors, it detects nothing and it does not stop on its own.

With all of that, the choice of slat is not an aesthetic whim. PVC works well in the sheltered pools of the vila and inland; solar polycarbonate uses the sun to stretch the season; transparent looks its best in pools with a view over the bay. 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 that there is no misunderstanding, is walk-on covers, telescopic covers, enclosures, domes, winter tarpaulins or thermal blankets: only automatic slatted covers, and since 2005.