Automatic cover with white slats closed over the pool of a villa with hedging and palm trees

Province of Tarragona · Manufacturer since 2005

Automatic Pool Covers in Tarragona and on the Costa Daurada

We build your slatted cover to size at our factory in Torrijos (Toledo) and it is fitted by our Barcelona team, which covers all 184 municipalities in the province, from the Baix Penedès to the Ebre delta. Three-year warranty on structure, motor, slats and fitting.

Manufacturer and installer

A cover we build ourselves and that our Barcelona team fits

At Ingerclima we have been building automatic slatted pool covers since 2005, at our own premises in Torrijos (Toledo). We do not resell them: we design them, build them, set the price and answer for them afterwards. We have more than 5,000 installations across Spain, with our own service department and spare parts, and we also heat the water with heat pumps, chillers and dehumidifiers as an official Calorex distributor. We have offices in Aravaca (Madrid) and San Pedro de Alcántara (Marbella), and on the Costa Daurada the house call, the measuring and the fitting are done by our Barcelona team, which covers all four Catalan provinces: we say so in the first line because it is the first thing people ask.

The province of Tarragona has a great many pools, and it has them spread out in a way that looks like no other Catalan province. The Land Registry records 41,968 uncovered pools across the 184 municipalities of the province, 1,825 more than in 2022: 4.5% in four years. That puts Tarragona third among the Catalan provinces by number of pools, behind Barcelona (108,322) and Girona (46,007) and well ahead of Lleida (8,351), within a Catalan total of 204,648 pools in 936 municipalities: one in five Catalan pools is here. To put the figure in context, Madrid has 147,555 pools, Alicante 132,495 and Málaga 83,789. The table of the four provinces and the legal and water sections are in the Barcelona and Catalonia page; here we go into what is different in Tarragona.

The words ‘pool cover’ are used for very different things, so it is worth being precise: we do one thing only, automatic slatted covers. They are all motorised, and there is no manual or crank version. As standard they are operated by key switch and hold-to-run: the slats move only while the button is held down and with the pool in view; the remote control and the phone are options on the quotation. The frame, the shaft, the brackets and the fixings are always AISI 316L stainless steel, the molybdenum grade made for marine air, and never any other material. The slats float on the water: there is nothing at the sides to clean or to grease, and what rests on the structure are the shaft legs and, where there is one, the housing, which is not a bench. The cover has no alarm and no obstacle sensors: it detects nothing and does not stop by itself, so it has to be operated with the pool in view and with nothing on top of it, and the slats must never be pulled by hand. Built to size in 4 to 5 weeks, plus one or two days of fitting, three years of warranty on the whole assembly and built to the French NF P90-308 standard.

41,968

pools registered in the province of Tarragona

+1,825

more pools than in 2022, 4.5% in four years

+5,000

covers installed since 2005

3 years

of warranty on structure, motor, slats and fitting

The 41,968 pools in the province of Tarragona, municipality by municipality

This is the real order of the province, with nobody left out. It is led by El Vendrell with 2,807 registered pools, followed by Calafell with 2,802: five pools between first and second, in two neighbouring municipalities of the Baix Penedès. Third comes Mont-roig del Camp with 2,614, fourth L’Ametlla de Mar with 2,342 and fifth Cambrils with 1,837. Behind them come Tortosa with 1,718, Cunit with 1,582, the city of Tarragona itself with 1,533, Roda de Berà with 1,321 and El Catllar with 1,270. Closing the top of the table are Reus with 1,125, La Bisbal del Penedès with 1,013, Valls with 859, Roquetes with 842, Salou with 824, Deltebre with 795, Alcanar with 693 and L’Ampolla with 659.

Three readings come out of that table, and together they explain what this province is like. The first: the two big cities do not lead it. The city of Tarragona comes eighth, with 1,533 pools, and Reus eleventh, with 1,125: between them they do not reach 2,700, fewer than El Vendrell on its own. That is not a statistical oddity, it is town planning: these are compact cities of apartment blocks, and the pool appears where there is a plot.

The second: the Baix Penedès is the heart of the province. El Vendrell, Calafell, Cunit and La Bisbal del Penedès add up to 8,204 pools between the four of them, almost one in five in the province, along a very short stretch of coast. This is the second-home belt closest to the Barcelona area, with villa estates built in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and that has a practical consequence: most of those pools are old, with dimensions that appear in no catalogue, and the cover has to be worked out over a pool that is already built.

The third: the Terres de l’Ebre carry real weight. L’Ametlla de Mar, Tortosa, Roquetes, Alcanar, Deltebre and L’Ampolla add up to 7,049 pools between the six of them, and it is a market that bears no resemblance to the Penedès one: larger plots, houses in year-round use in Tortosa and Roquetes, and estates on the coast that are very exposed to sea air. Two different realities, and the same order sheet does not settle both.

A necessary warning about these figures. The Land Registry census under-records: it is a floor, not a ceiling. There are pools that have never been declared and others that appear 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 hotel’s or a campsite’s, and that matters here: in Salou (824) and in Cambrils (1,837) a good part of the census is hotel, holiday-apartment and campsite water, not villas with gardens. The 2,807 pools in El Vendrell are every registered 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 official breakdown by district or by estate, so when we divide the province into comarques here we do it by geography, never by attributing figures to a neighbourhood.

That is where a slatted cover justifies itself with arguments that have nothing to do with looks. Closed, it cuts evaporation by 70% to 80%, which is where most of the water and most of the heat go, and chemical use falls by around 35%. With a heat pump and the cover in place the system uses 50% to 60% less, and with solar polycarbonate slats the water gains 6 or 7 °C during the day at no cost at all. The other reason is safety: closed, the slats form a continuous surface that prevents access to the water and holds 100 kg to the NF P90-308 standard, which is French and not European. That does not make it walk-on: it must not be walked on, and it is no substitute for adult supervision.

Wind and salt: what really decides the cover on the Costa Daurada

In this province the figure that shapes a cover most is not the temperature: it is the wind. The Costa Daurada is an open coast with little relief, and the air sweeps across it from side to side. From the north-west comes the mestral, dry and gusty, which in the Baix Ebre and the Montsià can blow for several days on end without easing off at night; in off the sea comes the garbí, gentler but laden with salt, on almost every summer afternoon. Between L’Ametlla de Mar, L’Ampolla, Deltebre and Alcanar the wind sets the calendar of the household.

A slatted cover copes well with that for one specific reason: the slats float on the water. The closed deck rests on the water itself and leaves no tensioned surface above it for the wind to lift like a sail. It is not a tarpaulin that has to be rolled up and tied down every time the wind picks up.

What the wind does demand is serious hardware and serious anchoring. The shaft legs, the brackets and the fixings are AISI 316L stainless steel, and the anchor points into the coping stone are set out on site one by one: bearing onto natural stone is not the same as bearing onto an eighties tile. On exposed plots the first thing we ask is not the size of the pool: it is where the wind comes from.

The second factor is salt. The coastline is long and heavily built up, with estates right on the beach from Cunit to Alcanar, and on the front line the breeze leaves salt on everything in the garden for much of the year. With the mestral it travels inland, so you do not have to face the sea to notice it. The answer is the material, and it is the same in Salou as in Valls: all our steel is AISI 316L, the molybdenum grade for marine air. There is no downgraded version for inland and no other material for away from the coast.

Winter on the Costa Daurada and in the Terres de l’Ebre

The Costa Daurada has mild winters along the coastal strip, but the swimming season is not the one in southern Spain: the water cools as soon as the September sun eases off and is slow to come back in spring. And as soon as you move away from the sea things change quickly: in the Alt Camp, the inland Penedès or the Ribera the swing between day and night temperatures is much greater, and whatever the sun puts into the water during the afternoon escapes overnight if the pool is uncovered.

For a cover that changes two things. The first is the slat: inland, solar polycarbonate counts for more, because it adds 6 or 7 °C during the day at no energy cost, which is exactly what is needed in May and in September, when the water is nearly there but does not quite arrive. The second is the habit: closing the cover at dusk, because a cover left open overnight lets almost everything the sun has put in during the day escape through evaporation.

And it is worth saying what we do not do: we do not build enclosures, domes, telescopic covers or walk-on covers, and we do not make winter tarpaulins or thermal blankets either. Our cover will see the pool through the winter closed as well, but it is none of those things.

The house shut for half the year, and what ends up in the pool

A great many pools in this province belong to houses that are used in summer and the odd weekend and are shut for the rest of the year. It is what we are told most often from Calafell, Cunit or Mont-roig: the pool does not get dirty because it is used, it gets dirty because nobody is there when it does.

What falls into the pool here has specific names. Along the coastal strip it is beach sand and salt, brought in by the garbí afternoon after afternoon. On the hillside estates of the Baix Penedès and the Baix Camp the pines reach the edge of the plot, and in wind the cones and the needles end up in the water. Inland it is dust off the fields, travelling with the mestral. And the autumn storms put soil and grit into the pool within hours, with the sloping plots getting the worst of it.

With the cover closed that dirt stays on top, is hosed off and never reaches the water: the floor stays clean, the filtration system works less hard and chemical use falls by around 35%. For a house that opens up in June, that is the difference between arriving and swimming, or spending a week getting the water back.

Which slat to choose in the province of Tarragona

We work with three slats, and the choice is not a catalogue one: it depends on the pool, on which way it faces and on how many months of the year you want to swim.

The PVC slat is the most popular and the most balanced: tough, happy in strong sun and salt air, and good at holding the heat the water has picked up during the day. It is the natural choice on the most exposed stretches of coast — Cunit, Calafell, Roda de Berà, Cambrils, Mont-roig del Camp, L’Ametlla de Mar, Alcanar — and in any house that wants something durable it never has to think about. It comes in four shades: white, beige, grey and blue.

Solar polycarbonate is the strongest card for swimming more months of the year. Its slats capture the sunlight and put 6 or 7 °C into the water by day at no running cost, which is exactly what it takes to bring May forward and win September back. It is the one we recommend most inland — El Catllar, Valls, La Bisbal del Penedès, Tortosa and Roquetes — where the nights cool off sooner. It comes in seven shades: blue, royal blue, platinum, green, smoke, royal black and royal grey.

Transparent polycarbonate puts looks first: it lets you see the water and sits discreetly in the garden, which is what houses built around the garden ask for. It comes in three finishes: transparent, platinum and blue. All three slats float on the water and all three go on a motorised cover. The detail of each one is on slat types.

Visible shaft above the water or submerged shaft: when each one fits

The other decision, every bit as important as the slat, is the roller unit, and it comes down to what stage the building work is at.

If the pool is already there — the usual case here, where the coast of the Penedès and the Baix Camp is full of shells from the seventies, eighties and nineties — the answer is a visible shaft above the water, with its AISI 316L stainless steel legs resting on the coping stone, left exposed or with a housing. Nothing is cut into the shell, the tiling is not touched and the filtration plant stays as it is. Our Barcelona team takes the measurements at your own house: shells like these are rarely a catalogue size, and in the Baix Penedès you find everything, kidney shapes and Roman steps included.

If the pool is still on the drawing board, the submerged shaft fits in its own recess and is invisible from the terrace. But it has to be allowed for before the concrete is poured: if the cover comes along once the shell is built, the sensible answer is the visible shaft. For practices and developers we supply dimensions and bracket details for the drawings. Every system is on cover models.

There is a third thing that decides as much here as the other two: access. The slats travel in long pieces and the shaft in a single length, and a lorry will not get down many of the estate roads on the Costa Dorada. The narrow, steep lanes of Calafell or Roda de Berà mean looking at where the unloading will happen before the quote is settled: if the only way in is by hand, we plan for it; we do not find out on fitting day.

Who builds your cover and who comes to your house to fit it

Here is the part that rarely gets put in writing: who does what. We are the manufacturer, and the cover is drawn and built to size at our own factory in Torrijos (Toledo): we set the price, and the three-year warranty is Ingerclima’s. And the people who come to your house to measure and to fit it are our Barcelona team, who cover the four Catalan provinces: from the Baix Penedès to Tarragona city, from the Baix Camp to the Terres de l’Ebre. The company’s other two bases are Aravaca (Madrid) and San Pedro de Alcántara (Marbella).

And we tell it that way because it is the best part: the visit, the measuring, the fitting and the after-sales are done by people from here, not by somebody passing through. The same team is still nearby afterwards, for an end-of-season adjustment or a service, and the spare — a slat, a motor, a control panel — comes out of our own factory in Spain; in a province with this many second homes that continuity is worth more than it sounds. You come in through Ingerclima, on this phone number and this website, and from here we pass you to the Barcelona team. To get the quote out quickly we ask for three things first: the dimensions of the shell, visible or submerged shaft, and how a vehicle gets in as far as the coping stone. With that the visit gets straight to the point and there are no surprises on fitting day. Write to us from contact.

Coverage area

Comarques and towns where we install in Tarragona

We cover all 184 municipalities in the province. These are the areas we work in most; if you cannot see yours, just ask.

Baix Penedès

El Vendrell
Calafell
Cunit
La Bisbal del Penedès

Tarragonès and Alt Camp

Roda de Berà
Tarragona city
El Catllar
Salou and Vila-seca
Altafulla and Torredembarra
Valls

Baix Camp

Terres de l’Ebre and the rest

L’Ametlla de Mar
Tortosa and Roquetes
Deltebre and L’Ampolla
Alcanar and the Montsià
All of Catalonia
Province of Barcelona
Province of Girona

How we work here: the cover is built to size in Torrijos (Toledo) and fitted by our Barcelona team, who cover the whole of Catalonia, Costa Dorada and Terres de l’Ebre included. If your town is not on the list, ask us for a quote and we will confirm it for you.

How many months can you swim on the Costa Dorada?

Without a cover the swimming season barely reaches beyond summer: the water takes its time warming up in spring and loses it as soon as the September sun eases off, even while the air is still pleasant. Closed at night, a cover stretches the season at both ends, and with solar polycarbonate slats it stretches further still.

The cover does two things at once. It cuts evaporation by 70 % to 80 %, which is where most of the heat leaves an uncovered pool, and if you choose solar polycarbonate it lets the sun through and warms the water underneath, 6 or 7 °C by day, at no running cost. The difference between the coast and inland is the night: in Cunit or Cambrils the sea softens it, while in the Alt Camp or the Ribera the swing is wider, so closing the cover at dusk means you are not starting from scratch every morning.

If you want a steady temperature right through the season, the missing piece is a heat pump, which we install as an official Calorex distributor: it is sized together with the cover, because with the cover in place it uses 50 % to 60 % less energy and the unit you need is not the same one. The detail on Catalan regulations, permits and the drought plan is on the Barcelona and Catalonia page.

Frequently asked questions

What owners in Tarragona and on the Costa Dorada ask us

Do you install in Tarragona if your factory is in Toledo?

Yes. We build the cover to size in Torrijos (Toledo), with a lead time of 4 to 5 weeks plus one or two days of fitting, and the people who come to your house to measure and who fit it are our Barcelona team, who cover all four Catalan provinces, from Cunit to the Ebro delta. The visit and the fitting are done by people from here, not by someone passing through, and the after-sales is theirs too. The price is ours to set and the three-year warranty is Ingerclima’s. The company’s other bases are Aravaca (Madrid) and San Pedro de Alcántara (Marbella).

My pool dates from the 1980s and is in Calafell. Can it be covered without building work?

Yes, and it is the case we are asked about most in this province, because the Baix Penedès filled up with villas with pools decades ago. On an existing pool we fit the shaft above the water, with its AISI 316L stainless steel brackets resting on the coping stone, either on view or inside a housing. Nothing is cut into the pool shell, the tiling is not touched and the filtration plant stays as it is. Our Barcelona team measures it at your own house, because shells of that age rarely come in a catalogue size. If you would rather see nothing above the coping, then we are talking about a submerged shaft, and that only fits if the pool is still at the design stage: it has to be allowed for before the concrete is poured.

Does it stand up to the mestral? Do you have to roll it away when there is a wind warning?

It stands up to it, and there is no need to roll it away: a slatted cover is not a tarpaulin. The slats float on the water and form a mat that rests on the surface itself, so there is no tensioned surface up there for the wind to lift. What we do on the most exposed plots is set out one by one the anchor points that fix the legs to the coping stone, and that is why we ask where the wind comes from before quoting. All the steel is AISI 316L. And the rule for using it does not change in wind, it only matters more: look at the pool before you operate it, clear anything that has fallen on top, and never pull the slats by hand.

Is there a crank-handle cover, with no motor? And does it have an alarm if somebody goes near?

No to both. All our covers are motorised and we do not build any manual or crank-handle version; what you choose are two things, the roller unit (above the water, with or without a housing, or submerged) and the slat (PVC, solar polycarbonate or transparent). And the cover has no alarm and no obstacle sensors: it detects nothing and it does not stop on its own, so whoever operates it has to look at the pool and check that there is nothing on top. As standard it comes with a key switch and hold-to-run operation, meaning it only moves while the button is held down; the remote control and the phone are optional. Nor do we make walk-on covers, telescopic covers, enclosures, domes, winter debris covers or solar blankets: only automatic slatted covers, and since 2005.

What maintenance does it need, and who looks after it if the house is shut up for half the year?

Maintenance is minimal: rinse the slats, the shaft and the brackets with fresh water from time to time — above all after several days of sea air or mestral — and check the motor. There is nothing along the sides to clean or grease, because the slat floats on the water. As we are the manufacturer, any spare part (a slat, a motor, a control panel) comes out of our own factory, and the people who come to your house to sort it out are our Barcelona team, the same ones who fitted it. That is what reassures owners whose house is shut for half the season in Calafell, in Mont-roig or in L’Ametlla: the pool stays clean and, if something goes wrong, you call the same place you bought it from. The warranty runs for three years and covers the whole thing: structure, motor, slats and fitting.