Automatic Pool Covers in Cunit

Cunit has 1,582 pools on the Land Registry

According to the Land Registry there are 1,582 uncovered pools registered in Cunit, 67 more than in 2022, when there were 1,515: a rise of 4.4% in four years. That puts the town seventh of the 184 municipalities in the province of Tarragona, behind El Vendrell (2,807), Calafell (2,802), Mont-roig del Camp (2,614), L’Ametlla de Mar (2,342), Cambrils (1,837) and Tortosa (1,718), and ahead of the city of Tarragona itself (1,533), Roda de Berà (1,321), El Catllar (1,270), Reus (1,125) and La Bisbal del Penedès (1,013), which is also in the Baix Penedès.

The province of Tarragona adds up to 41,968 pools across those 184 municipalities and has gained 1,825 since 2022, 4.5% in four years: Cunit is growing at the same rate as its province. Catalonia as a whole has 204,648 pools in 936 municipalities, with Barcelona in front (108,322), Girona second (46,007), Tarragona third and Lleida behind (8,351). Madrid is the leading province in Spain with 147,555 pools, Alicante the second with 132,495, and Málaga records 83,789.

What is interesting about Cunit is not the volume but the density: 9.74 km² with 1,582 pools works out at around 162 per square kilometre, almost ten for every hundred of its 16,385 residents on the 2025 register. There is no mystery to it: the municipality filled up by carving estates into building plots, not by putting up blocks of flats.

A word of caution about these numbers. The Land Registry count under-records: it is a floor, not a ceiling, because some pools are never declared and others appear years late. It also makes no distinction between a private pool, a communal one and a campsite pool: those 1,582 are every body of water in the municipality, not 1,582 houses with a pool. And the figure does not go below municipality level: there is no breakdown by district or by estate, so nobody can say how many there are in Can Nicolau and how many in Costa Cunit.

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%, which is water you do not have to top up season after season. The other reason people call us is safety: closed, the slats form a continuous surface that keeps the water out of reach, and the cover is built to the NF P90-308 standard, which is French, not European. That does not make it walkable or safe to step on, and you should not 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.

Wind, salt air and a house that sits empty: what Cunit asks of a cover

Cunit has an unusual advantage for a municipality of 9.74 km²: it measures its own weather, with an automatic station on the Servei Meteorològic de Catalunya network (station code WZ) and a municipal weather bulletin. So let us talk about this coast with figures from here.

Start with the wind, which is the first thing to come up in any conversation about a cover. The municipal average is light, around 6 km/h, with northerlies dominant from the night-time land breeze and the garbí, the south-westerly sea breeze, during the hours of sun. And here is the figure that matters: the mestral is the wind that picks up most strength in Cunit, it goes beyond 80 km/h, and the strongest gust recorded in the municipality is 116 km/h, on 24 January 2009. The llevant and the llebeig are the ones that stir up the sea most. All of this is on the town council’s climate page.

For the pool that counts in two ways. 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. And what the wind brings: with the cover on, leaves and grit stay on top and are rinsed off with a hose. Closed, the slats form a continuous surface sitting on the water, with no loose skirts for the mestral to lift.

The second thing is salt. Cunit’s seafront is 2.5 kilometres of fine sand between Cubelles and Calafell, split into two beaches: Cunit Ponent, about 1,500 metres long with three groynes, and Cunit Llevant, about 1,200 metres with four. Those seven groynes, built between 1977 and 1983 to hold the sand, give the shore a run of semicircular bays and stretch the beach line to some 3.3 kilometres; they are not natural coves, however much they look like it. What counts for the pool is that this breeze leaves salt on everything standing on the terrace. That is why the structure, the shaft, the brackets and the fittings are AISI 316L stainless steel, the molybdenum-bearing grade made for marine air, and we use nothing else. An occasional rinse with fresh water is all it needs, and there is nothing to grease, because the slats float on the water.

The third thing is rain: 555 mm a year on average in the council’s 1989-2012 series, with September the wettest month (89 mm) and July the driest (16 mm). But the average is misleading, because this coast rains in bursts: the monthly record is September 2005, with 292.4 mm in seven days. In July nothing falls and every litre in the pool has to be looked after; in September half a year’s rain can come down in a week, with the watercourses that cross the municipality — the riera de Cunit and the torrent de Cal Cove — carrying soil with them.

And the fourth is the household calendar. With 55.5% of the housing stock not in main use, many pools spend half the season with nobody in front of them, and a cover leaves the pool closed and out of reach. With the usual warning: it has no alarm and no obstacle sensors, and it does not stop on its own.

With all that in mind, the choice of slat is not a matter of taste. PVC does well on sheltered inland pools, and it comes in four shades: white, beige, grey and blue. Solar polycarbonate uses the sun to stretch the season, in seven shades: blue, royal blue, platinum, green, smoke, royal black and royal grey. Transparent, available in transparent, platinum and blue, looks best on pools that face the sea. It is all set out in slat types, and the roller units in cover models. What we do not make is walk-on covers, telescopic covers, enclosures, domes, winter tarpaulins or thermal blankets: automatic slatted covers only, and since 2005.