Automatic Pool Covers in L’Escala

The 2,159 pools on the Land Registry, and what that number does not tell you

According to the Land Registry there are 2,159 uncovered pools recorded in the municipality of L’Escala, 92 more than in 2022, when there were 2,067: a rise of 4.5% in four years. That puts L’Escala fourth of the 221 municipalities in the province of Girona, with almost 5% of the province’s pools. Only Castelló d’Empúries (3,066), Lloret de Mar (2,862) and Calonge i Sant Antoni (2,623) are ahead of it; behind come Begur (2,039), Roses (1,850) and Platja d’Aro (1,517). And L’Escala has almost twice as many as the city of Girona itself, which has 1,143.

Seen from further back, the figure says something about the whole province. Girona totals 46,007 pools across 221 municipalities and has gained 3,840 since 2022, a rise of 9.1%: it is the fastest-growing Catalan province. Catalonia holds 204,648 pools in 936 municipalities — Barcelona 108,322, Girona 46,007, Tarragona 41,968 and Lleida 8,351 — so almost one Catalan pool in four is in Girona. On the Spanish map, Madrid is the first province with 147,555 and Alicante the second with 132,495. And one detail worth reading properly: L’Escala is growing by 4.5%, below the provincial 9.1%. It is not that fewer pools are being built here: the municipality covers 16.3 km² and is already heavily built up, so what is left to do is, above all, to cover the pool that already exists.

That so small a municipality should hold 2,159 pools has a planning explanation: the local plan spreads L’Escala across distinct centres and estates — the nucli antic, Riells, Montgó and the Empúries area — and between them there is still room for a house with a garden. And one awkward clarification, because we would rather not sell you more than we know: there is no public statistic on the make-up of that housing stock. We have not found the share of second homes in L’Escala, nor the split between flats and houses with a plot, which is why we do not write it.

And another warning about the census. The Land Registry under-records: it is a floor, not a ceiling, because there are undeclared pools and shells that never make it onto the register. Nor does it tell a private pool from a communal one, or from a hotel’s or a campsite’s: the 2,159 are every registered body of water in the municipality, not 2,159 houses with a pool. And the figure goes no lower than the municipality: there is no official breakdown by centre or by estate, so nobody can say how many pools are in Riells and how many in Montgó. When we divide the area up by centres we do it by geography and by our own work, never by pinning figures on a neighbourhood. You can see the whole province in pool covers in Girona and the whole region in pool covers in Catalonia.

Tramuntana, salt and a real winter: what L’Escala demands of a cover

We are not going to invent a climate table for you. We do not have the official climate normals for L’Escala and we are not going to approximate them with figures from internet aggregators: you will not find an annual average on this page, nor millimetres of rain, nor hours of sunshine. The station with a long series on this coast is l’Estartit, measuring since 1974, and it stands in the neighbouring municipality of Torroella de Montgrí, not in L’Escala. What we do know, and it needs no figures, is how water behaves: a pool is slow to warm and slow to cool, while the air changes in a matter of hours. In autumn the water runs ahead of the air, and what decides whether you swim is how much heat the pool loses each night. That is where a cover does its work.

The first thing that decides matters here is the tramuntana. L’Escala sits at the southern end of the Golf de Roses, the corridor the north wind uses to enter the Alt Empordà, and the effect shows along its shoreline: the beaches of the Empúries arc and the platja de Riells face straight into it, while Cala Montgó, at the foot of the Montgrí, lies sheltered. We do not have mean wind speeds or maximum gusts for L’Escala, so we do not write them. What we do know is what the wind does to a pool: it drags whatever it finds into the water. A winter tarpaulin or a thermal blanket will not last there, and we do not make them. The slats are joined to one another and to the shaft, they float on the water as one continuous deck and they have weight of their own.

The second is the salt. Seven kilometres of coast, a marina with almost a thousand berths and sea wind for much of the year leave a salt film on everything that sits on a terrace in Riells or Montgó. That is why the structure, the shaft, the brackets and the fixings are AISI 316L stainless steel, the molybdenum-bearing grade made for marine air, and why we never use aluminium. Maintenance is next to nothing: a rinse with fresh water now and then. There are no rails or guides to grease, because the slats float on the water.

The third is what falls into the pool, and here everything does: pine needles and cones in the Montgó sector, fine sand along the Empúries and Riells strip when it blows hard, and mud when the rain comes all at once. With the cover closed that dirt stays on top and is washed off with a hose: the bottom stays clean and chemical use drops by around 35%.

The fourth is the winter, and here the Costa Brava is not the Levante coast: the swimming season is shorter than in Alicante or Málaga, and no cover on its own fixes that. What it does is stretch the season at both ends. A closed cover cuts evaporation by 70% to 80%, which is where most of the heat goes. With solar polycarbonate slats the sun passes through the slat and warms the water underneath, 6 or 7 °C during the day at no running cost, and if there is a heat pump the unit uses 50% to 60% less with the cover in place.

And the fifth is safety. Closed, the cover spans the whole pool and is built to the French NF P90-308 standard, the safety standard for pool covers. That does not make it walkable or something to step on: you must not walk on it. And we repeat the warning because it is safety, not small print: it has no alarm and no obstacle sensors, and it does not stop on its own. Whoever operates it has to do so beside the pool, with the water in view and nothing on top of it, and must never pull the slats by hand. We compare the three slats in slat types, and the roller units in cover models.