Calpe's climate and the right slat for your pool
Calpe has one of the kindest climates on the Costa Blanca: close to 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, an annual average around 18°C and warm, dry summers. Afternoons in July and August sit comfortably at 29–30°C. Outside high summer, though, the water gives its heat back overnight, and the breeze off the bay only speeds that up. A cover holds that warmth in, and adds weeks at either end of the season.
If you're not here all year round, the cover does its most valuable work while you're away. Closed, the pool stops collecting leaves, pine needles and the fine dust the Levante carries in, so the chlorine holds instead of burning off in the sun. You arrive from Manchester, Amsterdam or Brussels to water that's clear and ready to swim in, not to a fortnight of putting it right.
Safety matters just as much. A slatted cover closed over the water is a rigid surface, not a floating sheet: ours are built to NF P90-308, the French standard for pool safety covers. Closed, it keeps children and pets off the water. It never replaces adult supervision, but it does take the open pool out of the equation. For a villa that stands empty for weeks at a time, that's the single biggest reason our Calpe clients call us.
Evaporation is the other quiet cost. In a hot, dry summer an uncovered pool can lose a couple of centimetres of water a day, and with it the heat and the chemicals you've paid for. The cover fits pools that already exist: the roller sits above the water on the coping, with or without a cover box, and there's no structural work to the pool itself. On a new build or a full refurbishment, we hide the roller in a submerged pit instead.
So which slat? On exposed, salt-swept plots – Maryvilla, Sierra de Toix, Ortenbach – PVC is the sensible choice: robust, easy to rinse and very low maintenance. If you want to swim from spring well into autumn, solar polycarbonate uses the Calpe sun to lift the water a few degrees, and it's what most second-home owners here go for. Compare the two on our <a href="/en/lamas.html">slat types</a> page.
