If there is any place in Spain where it would be possible to carry out Ned’s project, the man who returns home swimming from pool to pool in the famous story by John Cheever, that must be Xàbia. The Alicante town of Marina Alta, a distinguished refuge for the Madrid and Basque bourgeoisies and a magnet for discreet northern Europeans, has 9,141 swimming pools, about three for each of its registered residents.
It is the Alicante municipality with the most uncovered pools registered in the cadastre, and the sixth in Spain, behind Madrid, Córdoba, Marbella, Murcia and Chiclana. Also in the national top-10 are Elx, which ranks seventh with its 8,348 pools, and Orihuela, eighth with 7,196. Dénia, Alicante, Teulada, Torrevieja, Rojales, Calp and Benissa exceed 4,000. In Teulada, which has less than 12,000 inhabitants, the aquatic density is even higher than in Xàbia: one pool for every 2.5 people.
The distribution of this refreshing accessory, so appreciated on extremely hot days like the current one, undoubtedly responds to a characteristic residential model, one that gives priority to single-family homes with gardens, as opposed to large apartment blocks. Hence, we have to look very low in the ranking for the most touristic town in the Valencian Community, Benidorm, which occupies position 272 with the 1,125 facilities it has, most of which serve a large number of users.
As in Alicante, despite the fame of the city of skyscrapers, the opposite model is so widespread, which bets on the abundance of chalets and bungalows with swimming pools for one or a few homes, the province leads the Spanish ratio of swimming pools per inhabitant . It has one for every 14.6 residents, ahead of the Balearic Islands (15.8), Girona (17.6), Tarragona (19.7), Malaga (21) and Murcia (28). In the only province that has more than Alicante, Madrid (138,988), the ratio is barely one for every 48 people.
Regarding Valencia, there are 99,891 outdoor swimming pools throughout the province, the fourth in Spain after Madrid, Alicante and Barcelona, ??with one facility for every 25.4 registered residents. Torrent is the town that concentrates the most (5,902), the twelfth in the Spanish ranking, and Llíria ranks 14th, with 5,463. In Castellón, there are 19,159 swimming pools, 30 per person.
With regard to the capitals, the urban peculiarities of each one are clearly reflected, since Valencia barely has 571 swimming pools registered, while Alicante, which in recent decades has expanded, and continues to do so, based on urbanizations landscaped, it already has 4,802 and has slipped into the national Top-20.
If we draw up a regional classification, Andalusia wins in absolute numbers, which has 304,000 of the total 1.2 million swimming pools that exist in Spain, ahead of the Valencian Community (246,000), but with a lower ratio per inhabitant, since there is one pool for every 28 Andalusians and one for every 21 Valencians.
Unlike in certain areas of Catalonia and Andalusia, the Valencian Community is not currently experiencing a situation of drought that would make it advisable to take restrictive measures, such as the prohibition on filling swimming pools, which has been adopted in numerous municipalities. In any case, the experts clarify that the pools regenerate and purify the water and are only completely emptied in the event of a breakdown, so any restrictive measure only affects portable facilities or those facilities that are empty for any reason.
