Automatic pool covers in La Nucía

La Nucía has 2,542 pools on the Catastro register

According to the Catastro there are 2,542 outdoor pools registered in the municipality of La Nucía, 61 more than in 2022, growth of 2.5 % in four years. The province of Alicante as a whole counts 132,495 pools spread across 141 municipalities and has gained 6,360 since 2022, a rise of 5.0 %, which makes it the second province in Spain for registered pools, behind only Madrid (147,555). The provincial average works out at around 940 pools per municipality: La Nucía is 2.7 times that, and it manages it in a municipality of barely 21.36 km², which leaves a density of almost 120 pools per square kilometre.

The figure that really captures this municipality, though, is the comparison with its neighbour. Benidorm has 1,163 pools on the register with some 77,000 inhabitants; La Nucía has 2,542 with 19,121. In other words, the town next door has four times the population and less than half the pools. This is not a statistical oddity: it is the difference between a vertical city of apartment towers and a municipality of detached plots on the hillside, where a private pool is not the exception but the norm. The same thing happens on a smaller scale across the rest of the district, with Altea on 2,890 pools, l'Alfàs del Pi on 2,856 and Finestrat on 1,471.

To place the figure within the province it helps to look at the full ranking. Jávea / Xàbia leads it with 9,317 pools, followed by Orihuela (7,375), Dénia (5,175), Torrevieja (4,931), Teulada-Moraira (4,887), the city of Alicante (4,866), Calpe (4,744) and Benissa (4,120). Then come Altea (2,890), l'Alfàs del Pi (2,856) and La Nucía (2,542), ahead of Benitachell (2,000), Finestrat (1,471) and Benidorm (1,163). Put another way: La Nucía is among the municipalities with the most pools in the province without having a beach, without having a harbour and without having a seafront promenade. What it has is hillside, plots and gardens.

A necessary word about these numbers, so that nobody reads more into them than is there. The Catastro census under-records: it is a floor, not a ceiling. Some pools were never declared, others appear late and small shells never make it onto the register, so the real figure is higher than the published one. The Catastro also makes no distinction between a private pool, a communal one, a hotel's or a sports club's: the 2,542 in La Nucía are all the bodies of water registered in the municipality, not 2,542 houses with a pool. And the data does not go below municipal level: there is no official breakdown by urbanisation or by partida, so it cannot be said how many are in Bello Horizonte, how many in Panorama or how many in Pinar de Garaita. When we divide the area up by urbanisation we do it by geography and by our own work, never by attributing figures to a neighbourhood.

In practice, that profile of a family pool on its own plot is the one that pays a cover back best, and here the argument is not an aesthetic one. A closed slatted cover cuts evaporation by between 70 % and 80 %: on an 8×4 metre pool that is between 15,000 and 25,000 litres a year that do not have to be replaced, and in a district that lives off reservoirs like Guadalest and Amadorio, with dry years one after another and recurring restrictions, that is no small detail. If there is a heat pump, the system's consumption falls by between 50 % and 60 %, and with solar polycarbonate slats the water gains 6 or 7 °C during the day at no cost at all. The other reason people call us is safety: closed, the slats form a continuous surface that prevents access to the water and holds 100 kg, built to NF P90-308, which is a French standard, not a European one. It is worth saying plainly: that does not make it a walk-on or step-on surface, and nobody should walk on it. It can take the weight of an accidental fall, which is what it is designed for.

No beach, but a microclimate: what La Nucía asks of a cover

La Nucía's selling point has never been the beach, because it does not have one. It is the microclimate. The municipality opens out into a sheltered valley, with the Sierra de Aitana closing off the horizon and the town centre 216 metres up on a promontory from which you can see the sea without being on it. That combination — moderate height, mountains behind and the Mediterranean three kilometres away — gives mild winters, a great deal of sun and a genuinely long swimming season. It is the same reason this district moved from dry-farmed almond and olive to irrigated citrus, loquat and persimmon as soon as the reservoirs arrived: the Amadorio, finished in 1957, and the Guadalest, built through the 1960s.

For a pool that means two things. The first is good: a cover earns its keep here for more months of the year than almost anywhere else in Spain, because the climate helps and all that is missing is holding on overnight to the heat gained during the day. The second is demanding: a great many hours of radiation falling on the slats. A badly chosen slat fades and turns brittle within a few summers, above all on the south-facing terraces of Panorama, Bello Horizonte or El Tossal. We work with profiles stabilised against ultraviolet light and we study the actual orientation of each pool before recommending a finish and a colour.

Then comes the material, and here a misunderstanding needs clearing up. The fact that La Nucía is an inland municipality does not mean the air is kind to metalwork: the coast at Altea is 3 kilometres away, the levante breeze climbs the hillside laden with moisture, and the pool's own treated water attacks any ordinary steel. That is why the whole structure, the shaft, the supports and the fixings are AISI 316L stainless steel, the same grade we fit on the sea front, and why we never use any other metal. Maintenance, by contrast, is almost nothing: rinse the slats, the shaft and the supports with fresh water now and then. There are no rails or guides to clean or grease, because the slats float on the water.

After that there is the hillside and the autumn. In the Marina Baixa it rains little and badly: the sky is clear almost all year and then September and October concentrate the rainfall all at once, with gota fría episodes that dump in a few hours what has not fallen in months. That water comes down the barranco carrying soil, grit and everything else it finds on the slope, and on a hillside plot the pool sits right below. For the rest of the year the culprit is the pine woods that cover a good part of the municipality: pine needles and cones end up in the water whenever the wind blows off the land. With the cover closed that dirt stays on top and is cleared with a hose, the bottom stays clean and the filtration plant works less.

And safety counts, which is the other real reason people call us, above all on sloping plots where the pool sits on a platform reached by steps. Closed, the cover is a mat of rigid slats that floats on the water and covers the whole pool, which is to say a physical barrier against a fall and not simply a saving on cleaning. That said, with one warning we always repeat: the cover has no alarm and no obstacle sensors. It detects nothing and does not stop by itself. Whoever operates it has to keep the water in sight, and pulling the slats by hand or running them with something on top damages the mechanism without warning.

With all of that, the choice of slat in La Nucía is not an aesthetic whim. PVC does well in the more sheltered pools of the town centre and the partidas inland, such as Muixara or Foia Blanca; solar polycarbonate makes use of the clear days to gain temperature and stretch the season at the hillside villas, which is what is asked for most here; and the transparent one looks its best in pools with sea views, which at Panorama, Bello Horizonte or El Tossal is a great many of them. We explain it all, with sections and weights, on our page of slat types, and the shaft arrangements on cover models. What we do not make, so that there is no misunderstanding, are walk-on covers, telescopic enclosures, pool enclosures, domes, winter debris covers or thermal blankets: only automatic slatted covers, and since 2005.