Automatic Pool Covers in Roda de Berà

Roda de Berà has 1,321 pools on the Land Registry

According to the Land Registry there are 1,321 uncovered pools registered in Roda de Berà, 150 more than in 2022, when there were 1,171: 12.8% growth in four years. That figure makes the town ninth of the 184 municipalities in the province of Tarragona. Ahead of it are El Vendrell (2,807), Calafell (2,802), 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); just behind come El Catllar (1,270), Reus (1,125), La Bisbal del Penedès (1,013), Valls (859), Roquetes (842) and Salou (824). Put another way: this municipality of 16.5 km² has more registered pools than Reus or Valls, and finishes just 212 short of the provincial capital.

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: Roda de Berà has grown almost three times as fast. Catalonia as a whole has 204,648 pools in 936 municipalities: Barcelona 108,322, Girona 46,007, Tarragona 41,968 and Lleida 8,351. To place that on the map, Madrid is the leading province in Spain with 147,555, Alicante the second with 132,495, and Málaga records 83,789.

What is interesting about Roda de Berà is not the absolute volume but the concentration. The provincial average works out at some 228 pools per municipality, and here there are almost six times that: around 80 pools per square kilometre and around 16 for every 100 of its 8,260 residents. The explanation lies in how the municipality is put together: eleven settlements, most of them estates born of tourism, with the growth spread across individual plots instead of concentrated in a front of apartment blocks.

A necessary word about these numbers. The Land Registry census under-records: it is a floor, not a ceiling, because some pools are never declared and others appear late. It also makes no distinction between a private pool, a communal one and a campsite pool: the 1,321 are every body of water in the municipality, not 1,321 houses with a pool. And the figure does not go below municipality level: there is no breakdown by settlement or by estate, so there is no saying how many are in Costa Daurada and how many at el Roc de Sant Gaietà.

That profile — a family pool on its own plot — is the one a cover pays back fastest on. 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, and in a town that sees around 450 mm of rain a year that shows. 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 carries 100 kg, built to the NF P90-308 standard, a French standard and not a European one. That does not make it a walkable surface. You can see the whole province at pool covers in Tarragona and the region as a whole at pool covers in Catalonia.

Mestral, marinada and levante: what the Costa Dorada demands of a cover

Let us start with the wind, because here it has names of its own and the council’s weather page describes them. In autumn and winter the mestral is frequent, arriving from inland, from the Segarra, dry and over the back of the serra del Quadrell. In spring and summer the marinada takes charge, the sea breeze, with the migjorn and the garbí, from the south and the south-west: those are the ones that soften the temperature. And there is a third that really punishes this coast, the levante: the marina was laid out in the shelter of the rocks at el Roc de Sant Gaietà precisely to be protected from its storms. For a pool this counts for two reasons. Evaporation: the air running over the surface of the water is, after the sun, the great driver of water and heat loss, and a closed cover cuts it by 70% to 80%. And what the wind brings with it: with the cover on, the fine sand and the leaves stay on top and are rinsed off with a hose, instead of ending up on the bottom and in the filters.

The second thing is salt. Platja Llarga is 1,070 metres long and 41 metres wide on average and has held a Blue Flag since 1999, and the marina packs 643 berths at the foot of the rocks: with the sea this close, salt-laden air reaches the terrace almost all year round. That is why the whole structure, the shaft, the brackets and the fixings are AISI 316L stainless steel, the molybdenum grade conceived for marine environments, and why we never use aluminium. Maintenance is next to nothing: rinse the slats, the shaft and the brackets with fresh water now and again. There are no rails or guides to grease, because the slats float on the water.

The third thing is water, which is not plentiful here. The council describes a Mediterranean climate of mild winters and warm summers, with average rainfall of around 450 mm a year that it calls scarce and that is concentrated between September and December and in April and May. That means two things: that it pays to look after every litre in the pool, because replacing what evaporates is the invisible cost of the season; and that the rain does not arrive spread out but all at once, and when it comes down the torrent de l’Aguilera runs with soil — exactly the moment when you want the pool covered.

The fourth thing is what falls into the water the rest of the year, and here it has a name: sand. Platja Llarga has its own dune belt, Els Madalers, an ecosystem of special interest that the council highlights as part of the beach’s value, and its southern limit already runs into the Creixell beach. That front of fine sand explains why, on the first and second rows of houses, the bottom of the pool picks up grit every time the wind blows off the sea. With the cover closed that sand reaches neither the bottom nor the filter: it stays on top of the slats.

And the fifth thing is the household calendar. As most of the settlements are second-home estates, many pools spend half the season with nobody in front of them, and the cover leaves the pool covered and closed to access while the house stands empty. With one warning we always repeat: there is 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 nothing on top of it.

With all of this in mind, the choice of slat is not a matter of taste. PVC slats work well in the sheltered pools of the old centre and inland, in four shades: white, beige, grey and blue. Solar polycarbonate uses the sun to stretch the season and adds 6 or 7 °C during the day at no cost, in seven shades: blue, royal blue, platinum, green, smoke, royal black and royal grey. Transparent polycarbonate comes into its own in pools with a view, in transparent, platinum and blue. We set it all out in slat types, and the roller systems in cover models. What we do not do is walk-on covers, telescopic covers, enclosures, domes, winter tarpaulins or thermal blankets: only automatic slatted covers, and since 2005.