Automatic pool covers in Cambrils

Cambrils has 1,837 pools on the Land Registry

According to the Land Registry there are 1,837 uncovered pools registered in Cambrils, 220 more than in 2022, when there were 1,617: 13.6% growth in four years, three times the provincial rate. That makes the town the fifth of the 184 municipalities in the province of Tarragona, behind El Vendrell (2,807), Calafell (2,802), Mont-roig del Camp (2,614) and L’Ametlla de Mar (2,342), and ahead of Tortosa (1,718), Cunit (1,582), the city of Tarragona itself (1,533), Roda de Berà (1,321), El Catllar (1,270) and Reus (1,125). The province of Tarragona has 41,968 pools and has gained 1,825 since 2022, 4.5% more. Across Catalonia there are 204,648 pools spread over 936 municipalities: Barcelona leads with 108,322, Girona is second with 46,007, Tarragona third and Lleida has 8,351.

For context: Madrid is the leading province in Spain with 147,555 pools, Alicante the second with 132,495, and Málaga records 83,789. Tarragona is not in that league by volume, but Cambrils does stand out for concentration: 1,837 pools in a municipality of some 35 km² is more than eight times the provincial average per municipality, and of the order of 52 pools per square kilometre.

There is a town-planning explanation for why a municipality this size holds so many pools. Cambrils did not grow as a wall of apartment blocks: it grew as two compact centres plus a patchwork of plot-by-plot estates in the eastern and western sectors. The INE’s 2021 Population and Housing Census counts 31,733 conventional family dwellings here, of which 14,146 are main residences and 17,587 are not: 55.4%, where the INE puts the Spanish average at 8.1 million non-main dwellings, 30.4% of the total. And the registered population is not small either: 37,068 inhabitants at 1 January 2025 according to Idescat, using the official INE figures, of whom 7,595 are foreign nationals, 20.49% of the town.

One necessary 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. Some pools are never declared and others are entered late, so the real figure is higher than the published one. The Land Registry also does not tell a private pool from a communal one or from a campsite pool: the 1,837 are every body of water in the municipality, not 1,837 houses with a pool. And the data does not go below municipal level: there is no breakdown by district or by estate, so there is no way of saying how many are in Vilafortuny and how many in la Vila. When we break the area down we do it by geography and by our own work, never by pinning numbers on a neighbourhood.

In practice, that profile — a family pool on its own plot — is the one where a cover pays for itself fastest. Closed, it cuts evaporation by 70% to 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 drops by 50% to 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, built to the NF P90-308 standard, a French one rather than a European one. That does not make it a walk-on or step-on surface, and nobody should walk on it. You can see the whole province on pool covers in Tarragona and the region as a whole 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 on this coast it is the first thing that comes up in any conversation about pools. The wind that sets the tone in the Camp de Tarragona is the mestral: a dry, gusty north-westerly, funnelled down the Ebro valley and the Camp depression. In a flat municipality, with no hillside and no screen of high ground, that air reaches the plot with nothing to slow it. And wind counts for two reasons. The first is evaporation: after the sun, air moving across the water surface is the great driver of water and heat loss, and a closed cover takes that surface out of the wind. The second is what the wind carries: with the cover on, leaves and grit stay on top and are hosed off.

The nearest automatic station of the Servei Meteorològic de Catalunya is called “Vinyols i els Arcs - Cambrils”, but it has been measuring since May 1989 in the neighbouring municipality of Vinyols i els Arcs, 30 metres above sea level, inland rather than on the shore. And within Cambrils itself exposure varies a great deal: a plot on the sand at el Cavet is nothing like a house in la Vila. That is something we look at on your own plot the day we come to measure.

The second thing is salt. Cambrils is a coast of open sandy beaches, not of rocky coves: a continuous shoreline split into two sectors by the harbour. To the east lie the platja del Prat d’en Forès — also called del Regueral — el Cavet between its groynes, l’Esquirol and the Vilafortuny beach on the way to Salou; west of the harbour are the platges de ponent, l’Horta de Santa Maria, la Llosa and l’Ardiaca. That salt air is the reason the whole structure, the shaft, the brackets and the fixings are AISI 316L stainless steel, the grade alloyed with molybdenum, and the reason we never use aluminium. There are no rails or guides to grease, because the slats float on the water.

The third is the water that comes down off the land. The municipality is crossed by Mediterranean rieras, not by rivers: the riera de Riudecanyes, the d’Alforja and the one at Maspujols, also called de Riudoms, which rises in the serra de la Mussara. These are seasonal watercourses, dry for most of the year, and their alluvium formed the farmland of the plain. For a pool that means two things: looking after every litre in the pool through the long stretches without rain, and having the water covered when the rieras run all at once and the air is full of dust.

The fourth is winter and the household calendar. With 55.4% of the homes not in main use, many pools here spend half the season with nobody in front of them, and a closed cover leaves the pool covered and shut off from access. For the winter we do not do winter tarpaulins or thermal blankets: the slatted cover does that job through the dead months, and it is not a seasonal product you put on and take off again.

And the fifth is the choice of slat, which here is not a matter of taste. PVC slats suit the sheltered pools of la Vila and inland, and are made in four shades: white, beige, grey and blue. Solar polycarbonate uses the sun to stretch the swimming season and adds 6 or 7 °C during the day at no energy cost; there are seven shades: blue, royal blue, platinum, green, smoke, royal black and royal grey. Transparent polycarbonate comes into its own on pools with a sea view, and has three finishes: transparent, platinum and blue. We set it all out, with sections and weights, on slat types, and the roller unit systems on cover models. What we do not do, so there is no misunderstanding, is walk-on covers, telescopic covers, enclosures, domes, winter tarpaulins or thermal blankets: only automatic slatted covers, and we have done since 2005.