Automatic Pool Covers in El Vendrell

El Vendrell has 2,807 pools on the Land Registry

According to the Land Registry there are 2,807 uncovered pools registered in El Vendrell, 157 more than in 2022, when there were 2,650: 5.9% growth in four years. That figure makes the town the first of the 184 municipalities in the province of Tarragona, and only just: Calafell follows with 2,802, five fewer. Behind them come Mont-roig del Camp (2,614), L’Ametlla de Mar (2,342), Cambrils (1,837), Tortosa (1,718), Cunit (1,582) and the city of Tarragona itself (1,533). The province adds up to 41,968 pools and has gained 1,825 since 2022, 4.5% more. Across Catalonia there are 204,648 pools in 936 municipalities: Barcelona with 108,322, Girona with 46,007, Tarragona with 41,968 and Lleida with 8,351.

To place it on the Spanish map: Madrid is the first province with 147,555 pools, Alicante the second with 132,495, and Málaga records 83,789. Tarragona is not in that league for sheer volume, but El Vendrell does stand out for density: 2,807 pools in 36.8 km² works out at around 76 per square kilometre. In absolute terms that is more than twelve times the 228 pools an average municipality in the province has, and roughly 7 for every 100 of the 40,440 residents the INE counted at 1 January 2024.

There is a concrete reason why the capital of the Baix Penedès has so many pools, and it lies in the housing census. The 2021 Population and Housing Census counts 31,063 family dwellings in El Vendrell: 15,625 main residences and 15,438 that are not. Almost half the housing stock exists for the summer, and the summer here is spread across three seaside neighbourhoods. The other half of the story is that the town is growing fast: the INE counted 40,440 residents at 1 January 2024, and the Baix Penedès is one of the comarques gaining the most people, as residents move out from the Barcelona area.

A necessary word of caution about these numbers, so that nobody reads more into them than is there. The Land Registry census under-records: some pools are never declared and others are entered late, so the real figure is higher than the published one. Nor does it tell a private pool from a communal one or from a campsite pool: the 2,807 are every body of water in the municipal area, not 2,807 houses with a pool. And the data does not go below municipality level: there is no breakdown by district or by estate, so there is no saying how many are in Coma-ruga and how many in the old town. When we divide the area up we do it by geography, never by attributing figures to a neighbourhood.

In practice, that profile — a family pool on its own plot — is the one a cover pays for itself on fastest. Closed, it cuts evaporation by 70% to 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 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 takes 100 kg, built to the NF P90-308 standard — a French standard, not a European one. That does not make it walk-on or stand-on. You can see the whole province in pool covers in Tarragona and the region as a whole in pool covers in Catalonia.

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

Let us start with the wind, because it is the first thing that comes up in any conversation about a cover. This coast has four winds with names of their own, and each one does something different to a pool. The mestral, from the north-west, dry and cold, blows in gusts and is the typical autumn and winter wind in the comarques of Tarragona: it lifts leaves and fine grit and dries the air out. The garbí or llebeig, from the south-west, mild, comes in as a sea breeze late in the afternoon. The marinada is the sea breeze that rules summer afternoons and softens the El Vendrell plain, and it is also the one that leaves salt on everything around the pool. And the llevant, from the east, is behind the heavy, persistent rains of September, October and November. How your particular plot is exposed is something our Barcelona team looks at on the day of the visit: which way it faces, what stands in front of it and where the wind comes in from. Wind matters for two reasons: evaporation, which after the sun is the main driver of water and heat loss, and which a closed cover stops at source by taking the water surface out of the air; and what the wind carries in, which with the cover on stays on top and is rinsed off with a hose instead of sinking to the bottom and into the filters.

The second thing is salt, and here there is a detail no other town on this coast has: opposite the municipal area of El Vendrell, off Coma-ruga, lies the Masía Blanca Marine Reserve, established by an Order of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food of 21 December 1999 and part of Spain’s network of marine reserves. These are seabeds less than 25 metres deep, with Posidonia oceanica meadows and maërl beds. That is open sea a few metres from many of the pools we cover, and open sea means salt aerosol all year round. It is the reason the whole structure, the shaft, the brackets and the fittings are AISI 316L stainless steel, and the reason 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 thing is the rain, which here is not steady but concentrated. The town’s average annual rainfall is below 600 millimetres, with a dry summer and the peak in autumn: long spells when it barely rains and episodes that come down all at once. The municipal area drains through the riera de la Bisbal, which crosses it from north to south and carries storm water only, reaching the sea at Sant Salvador beach; it takes in, on its left, the riera de Banyeres or torrent del Lluc, coming down from Sant Jaume dels Domenys, and on its right the rasa de les Torretes and the Rasa Fonda, coming down from Albinyana, and reaches the sea channelled between walls. 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 the soil comes down all at once.

The fourth thing is what falls into the pool the rest of the year. At Sant Salvador, over the old course of the riera de la Bisbal and the flood-prone land between the railway and the sea, lies the espai natural de les Madrigueres, a coastal wetland of some 30 hectares with shifting dunes, reed beds and tamarisks. Having a place like that next door is part of what makes the area, and part of the explanation for why the bottom of the pool gets dirty: pollen, seeds, reed debris and fine sand end up in the water every time the wind blows.

And the fifth is the household calendar, which in El Vendrell counts for more than in almost any other town on the Costa Dorada: with nearly half the dwellings not in main use, many pools spend half the season with nobody in front of them. A cover leaves the pool covered and closed to access while you are away. With one 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 view and with nothing on top of it.

With all that, the choice of slat is not a matter of looks. PVC works well on the sheltered pools in the town centre and on the plain, and we make it in four shades: white, beige, grey and blue. Solar polycarbonate puts the sun to work to stretch the season and comes in seven shades — blue, royal blue, platinum, green, smoke, royal black and royal grey. Transparent, in transparent, platinum and blue, looks its best on pools in open plots. 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 enclosures, pool enclosures, domes, winter tarpaulins or thermal blankets: only automatic slatted covers, and since 2005.