Little Piper, the lovely daughter of the Papay family who visited us last summer wrote in our guestbook: I love the pool.
The parents confessed to us before saying goodbye that there was no way to get Piper out of the pool, she spent hours in it swimming and enjoying herself on her mat. They managed to do a lot of sightseeing and visit the different beaches and towns along the Valencian coast but, for sure, Piper will remember our pool.
A pool with history
And we say that this is a pool with history because it has. In fact, it was here before the house. In its day it was an irrigation pond where the water came from the mountain through pipes. Until not so long ago, we had to fill the pool, located in an elevated part of the fields, to then be able to distribute the water to the different orange and mandarin orchards.
That form of irrigation was called "blanket irrigation". This way of irrigating consisted of flooding the fields with water every 10 or 15 days (depending on the season, the heat or the rains) so that all the land was irrigated.
The fields had to be properly separated by what we call "ridges". These were mounds of earth that delimited a portion of the field and served to control the water.
The pond, being located high up, had enough pressure to send the water through gutters to the different fields, where a person was responsible for opening and closing the plugs that gave way to the water in these sections made of ridges.
Drip irrigation
As the years went by, we optimized the resources and the water supply. First we built a well from which we could get the water we needed without having to go to the mountains to get it, and then we introduced drip irrigation.
We leave unused a raft that, for generations, was the cornerstone of the production of oranges and mandarins of the Hort de la Llucera and that nowadays gives rise to a unique swimming pool.
The swimming pool of Villa Luz
When we made the decision to adapt Villa Luz as a rural house, it was clear to us that what was once a raft, where our grandparents used to bathe, had to be converted into a spectacular swimming pool. And modesty aside, we succeeded. Just ask little Piper.
We decided not to take away an iota of its history. To keep most of its features. The pipes that brought the water to the pond and those that led out to the countryside can still be seen today. Also the exterior floor of the swimming pool. A beautiful concrete floor that has stoically withstood the passage of time.
But we knew we had to modernize the pool. We had to modify the interior to make it more pleasant to the touch when you were inside and, above all, choose the best way to keep the pool clean. After consulting several pool shops we came up with the idea of using one of these gutters to purify the water.
We made one of the sides of the pool slightly lower than the rest so that the excess water fell down this side in the form of a waterfall. This water, with all the leaves and bugs that remain on the surface, is released and falls into an old gutter, covered with stones, which make a first filtering of the water.
We say a first filtering because this gutter takes the water to a water treatment plant located under the pool that makes a second filtering of the water, cleans the water of impurities and returns it back to the pool.
If we have optimized to the maximum the water resources in our fields to save as much water as possible we were not going to be less with our swimming pool. It stays clean with the same water all year round.
Vera
Very good post. Thanks for sharing it.