In Spain there are almost 1.3 million private outdoor swimming pools, one for every 37 inhabitants. But in a town in Guadalajara they shatter that information. This is Illana, 90 kilometers from Madrid, with 776 registered residents and 734 swimming pools, practically one per person, … as certified by the General Directorate of the Cadastre, dependent on the Ministry of Finance. In absolute terms, the city of Madrid is the leader in the number of swimming pools (14,521), and is followed by Córdoba and Marbella. But Illana tops the list of the ratio of pools per inhabitants, (0.95 per neighbor) compared to Badia del Vallès, in Barcelona, which only has three for 13,163 people (0.0002), occupying the last place on the list.
“In the town we have some swimming pools, but the majority are in the urbanizations,” Gemma says on the phone while in the background she can be heard serving the customers of her grocery store in the historic center of the Alcarreña town.
«About ten kilometers from the center there are three fairly large urbanizations, El Soto, Riollano and Cuartillejo, which are the ones with the homes with the swimming pools. There are many second homes for people from Madrid who come on weekends and on vacation, although there are more and more older people and young couples with children who live here all year round,” explains the owner of the grocery store, one of the few that do not have a pool where you can take a dip. “When she was a child she had a little inflatable rubber pool, but she didn’t go in anymore,” she says between laughs.
No water problems
The three urbanizations, adjacent to each other, are very close to the Tagus River, one of the largest in the country and which this spring brings water in abundance. Villas and agricultural farms were already built on those same banks during the time of the Roman Empire.
At the moment there is water for swimming pools, for homes and also for agriculture. “We have never had drought problems, but a few years ago the Tagus dropped in level and in the part of the river that passes through the urbanizations, remains of scrap metal did appear,” details Ángela, a farmer with cereal and legume crops in Illana, and that he runs a company (Farmer Technology) that installs GPS systems so that tractors drive themselves.
The proliferation of swimming pools represents a gold mine for the El Soto hardware store, where they sell more chlorine tablets than screws. A good part of its supplies are aimed at pool maintenance, a field where one of the latest modernities is cleaning robots that are programmed from a mobile phone. According to Kike Urdiales, a well-known ‘tiktoker’ in the world of swimming pool construction, prices are as varied as those in the automobile market, “but a construction site measuring five by three meters and with the basics can cost 20,000 euros.”
Most private pools are now operational. The rest of the town will have to wait to get wet until July 1, the scheduled opening date of the municipal. It will be your particular ‘crowd bath’.
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