The Riosequillo pool, in Buitrago de Lozoya (Madrid), accommodates the entire population of the municipality. With an area of almost 4,500 square meters, at two bathers per meter, there is plenty of space for the almost 2,000 inhabitants of the town. This is not a test of the program What do we bet?, but a curiosity that is extracted from the information on swimming pools throughout the country downloaded from the website of the General Directorate of Cadastre.

Spain has at least 1,277,052 outdoor swimming pools, according to the latest data published. This figure, however, does not include those of the Basque Country and Navarra, which have their own cadastral sources. Nor those that have not been declared. Find your street on the map to locate the pools around you and explore the areas with the most pools.

With an area of more than 14.5 hectares and 1,200 meters in length, the Olympic Channel of Catalonia, in Castelldefels, is among the largest facilities in all of Spain. However, this artificial channel is reserved for sports such as canoeing, water skiing or windsurfing..

Yes, the more than 17,000 square meters of Lake Martiánez, a set of swimming pools next to the Atlantic located in Puerto de la Cruz, in Tenerife, are destined for bathing.. The largest of them all exceeds 12,500 square meters. Both are public facilities.

To the south of the same island is the largest tourist offer in Tenerife. There, in Adeje, is the Siam Park water park, in which one of its vessels occupies 1.04 hectares. It is one of the attractions in the Canary Islands that receives the most visits, according to the advertising of the Loro Parque group, owner of the center.

Back on the Peninsula, between the provinces of Cádiz and Málaga, Casares has an artificial lagoon, Alcazaba Lagoon, of 1.4 hectares. This artificial lagoon is made up of a large leisure and restaurant complex. Inside, with a capacity of 3,572 people, the Puerta del Hierro pool in Madrid, with a sheet of water of 6,545 square meters.

Madrid, capital of swimming pools

In absolute numbers, Madrid is the city with the largest number of outdoor pools: a total of 14,127. Throughout the summer, the rows of refrigerators, mats and sunglasses are drawn at the doors of each trusted municipal swimming pool, in many of which it is quite a feat to get entry. The capital is followed by Córdoba, Marbella and Murcia, all of them with more than 10,000 places, between public and private, to take a bath..

Chiclana de la Frontera is also another benchmark, being the fifth municipality with the largest number of swimming pools (9,318). This town on the Cadiz coast contrasts with the capital of its province, Cádiz, where there are barely 35 pools. For its part, the second most populous city in the country, Barcelona, barely reaches 1,500, 10 times less than those registered in Madrid..

The Spanish coasts are dotted with private pools, especially in the Mediterranean area, where more than half of the total is concentrated.. The concentration of swimming pools in provinces with beaches is much more pronounced than in inland ones. Alicante, for example, which has 1.9 million inhabitants, has 128,293 swimming pools, which means about 67 pools for every 1,000 inhabitants.. Madrid, with three times the population, has a ratio of two. In the beach municipalities, if you can have the best of both worlds, perfect.

An example from Alicante is Jávea, the sixth municipality with the most swimming pools. Here there is one for every three inhabitants. On the coast of the Valencian Community, the rows of swimming pools draw the shape of the urbanizations and chalets. Counterintuitive or not, coastal areas are much more likely to be covered in pools. Jávea is no exception: second homes and tourism raise the pool count. A few kilometers away, the municipalities of Teulada and Benissa each have more than 4,000 swimming pools for less than 12,000 residents..

Girona, with a total of 43,303 pools, also enjoys the same landscape of blue dots: Castelló d'Empúries, with a population of more than 11,000 people, has 242.6 bathing spaces for every 1,000 inhabitants.. The same is the case with Begur, which, with just over 4,000 inhabitants, has a total of 1,849 swimming pools..

Those who live in the driest areas of the Peninsula do not miss the opportunity to soak their feet. An inland municipality like El Casar de Escalona, in the province of Toledo, has the peculiarity of having a number of inhabitants (1,891) and pools (1,406) close to parity. In Castilnuevo, in Guadalajara, there is exactly one pool for each neighbor. At the beginning of 2022, six people were registered in the register: the same number of pools that the cadastre records there.

Eight out of 10, in private residences

The cadastre data also has information on the ownership or type of use of the pools. 85% of the pools are for residential use, while only 3% are public. If we measure the surface they occupy, the situation is similar. 61.4% correspond to residential pools, while 10.2% are public. The rest has other uses, such as commercial, agricultural or industrial, according to the categorization of the cadastre and, although they barely touch 12% of the total, its area is 28.4%..

“We have noticed an increase in demand due to the pandemic. It has been the boom between 2020 and 2021”, says Agustí Ferrer, general director of the Spanish Association of Professionals in the Pool Sector. This sector moves more than 1,500 million euros, according to the spokesperson, to be distributed among more than 2,000 companies dedicated to design, construction, installation and maintenance.

Since work and fun can also go hand in hand, 449 offices in Spain have a swimming pool for their employees to enjoy during or after the workday. The location of these is very similar to that of the rest of the private pools, since they are concentrated especially in the south of the peninsula and in the Mediterranean area.

It is difficult to find a municipality that does not have any place for registered bathing. Of the 7,608 towns for which there is information, without counting the Basque Country and Navarra, only 759 have no swimming pool.

The largest municipality with these conditions is Navia de Suarna, located in the province of Lugo and with a population close to 1,000 inhabitants.. In the case of Emperador, located in Valencia, the reasons why its more than 700 inhabitants cannot enjoy a bath are quite justified: with 0.33 km², it is the smallest population center in Spain and also the one with the largest population density has. Sometimes, not having a pool has a casuistry of force majeure.

Methodology