...designed and built by Val dolphin:
Peter's Pool built in 1992 near Orgiva, Spain
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is one of those eccentric English people, amongst whom I include myself, whom one is more likely to encounter living abroad than in England. He had purchased his a matter of weeks before I met him, using the proceeds of a small inheritance. The buildings and estate were in run-down condition and he was keen to have friendly people around helping renovate them. By a remarkable coincidence, my partner and I were friends of another would-be buyer of it in England as well as having become good friends with Peter in Spain.
The Alpujarras of southern Spain are a rugged place: here, the edges of perfection and precision are chipped and ground to dust in accordance with the principle of faster than anywhere I've lived.Often, indeed, faster than I manage to construct them!It's a place where hair-shirters and spartan types abound. The unbelievably bad plumbing is legendary and assumed to be as it should be by all who live here but me. When I arrived, Peter already had a visitor hacking away with an at the stony, sloping site for the pool. But my main competitor in the field of swimming holes at the time, as far as Peter was concerned, was the similarly named TrevOR. Trevor did a nice line in just what Peter wanted - essentially, rendered, bowl-shaped holes. The major factor in my favour in my managing to keep the job was probably that I was living at Peter's. In fact, I was living in a tent under a fig tree and my front doorstep was, literally, the lip of the swimming pool excavation!
With his primarily academic background, Peter's approach to practical tasks is rather circumspect compared to mine. But we had soon an arrangement that always works well for me - he just let me get on with building the pool. I have never tried to sell a swimming pool to anyone who did not want one, and you will have gathered that this includes Peter. The fact is, almost everyone in Andalusia wants one: it's almost a prerequisite for living here in August, when afternoon temperatures can soar into the forties (that's hundreds if you hanker after Fahrenheit). However, I did most definitely twist Peter's arm to allow me to virtually donate him an edifice that far surpassed his expectations, for the very purpose of being able to tell you this and the subsequent stories....The poor guy just wanted a hole in the ground that would hold water, in which to take refuge from the August grilling. I wanted to sculpt an "eco" swimming pool .
One morning during the construction of the pool, I had to contend with being suddenly woken before sunrise by a wasp-like ancient aeroplane, with hammer-drill propeller tips and not the slightest apology for an exhaust system, dive-bombing me from over the brow of the mountain, flying just above tree top height, spraying banned insecticides over every property with an olive tree in its path, whether the proprietor supported it or not. With only my tent mosquito net for protection this was - like the sentence describing the event - just too much for me. Convinced I must now become an Eco-warrier, I leapt into my van and rallied (sideways round all the hairpin bends) down to the river bed in the next valley, where I parked across the middle of the makeshift runway the plane used for fuel and poison refills. Being too insular to have yet learned enough Spanish (in the broadest sense!) to get them to understand why I was there, I achieved nothing bar becoming an object for a scrum of heavies to practise rolling obstructions off the runway (sideways, again... poor van) and getting the few savvy foreigners in the valley who had managed to negotiate pacts with the plane gratuitously -bombed....
Nothing about the structure of the pool was calculated, designed or even drawn on paper, let alone a computer.... It grew like a hollow sculpture. I joined in with the excavation that Peter's had already started by hand. It was in a small , its maximum extent limited by the slope of the land, various rocks, an almond, a fig, an olive and a pomegranate (...trees, that is). As I arrived on the job, the excavation was looking set to become my least favourite shape - even less favourite than rectangular - . Like a dolphin to water, I took on the role of the eyes of the job, as well as a considerable amount of the picking and shovelling. The wwoofer migrated back and forth between the pool and more horticultural activities and an obligatory Irish labourer even materialised when the time came for mixing and barrowing concrete!
I visualised superimposed upon the chaotic site, pinned them metaphorically on the rocks and trees and let the unpinned bits wriggle around until they looked comfortable. A more pragmatic engineer may have come up with a similar shape but built the pool walls in front of the rocks, or even worse, built the rocks into the walls but rendered over them. The rocks were too heavy to take out without machinery, and for me, too symbolic to leave out, too beautiful to deface. I considered the warnings of guaranteed failure from those that had tried it before, and went about incorporating the rocks in the walls.
I realise here that the very method of construction I adapted to fit the bill is something of a uniqueness. Masonry is relatively cheap in Andalusia. The intensity of the environment, particularly its light and its insects, incline the Andaluz builder to use masonry where, in colder climes, wood or plastics would be chosen. So masonry it was to be, without a doubt. English Trevor recommended his dish technique, much used in Africa, where frost is not a problem and the cost of bulk materials is. The saucer shape of is determined by the maximum slope of soil that he can get render to stick to. To my mind, not the ideal shape for a compact vessel to swim in, much of it being too shallow to do anything except slide around on while you try to get in or out. Whilst the dish shape and chicken wire incorporated in the mortar give it relatively good strength, there is an easily exceeded limit to what can be expected from a shell of less than 5 cm thickness! For an indication of scale, the blocks used and visible in the photos are 40 x 20 x 20 cm and weigh about 15 kg each. So when I carried two blocks, I was carrying nearly half my weight.
The locals use a heavy-soup-and-steel technique for their rapid rectangles, to err on the safe side. A wall of concrete soup is poured around a grid of steel bars located between cheap, extruded earthenware block shutterings and vibrated down with a polla de burro - a typically 2 kW 'donkey's prick'. You need a train of trucks delivering the materials, or mules where trucks can't get, to do it this way.The sheets of steel mesh limit the shape complexity and the block shuttering walls add their thickness to the area to excavate for a given area of water, unless the earth walls are stable and shaped well enough to use as the outer shuttering and the inner shuttering is demolished afterwards. The extra thickness would have meant a smaller pool or an excavator to do this job. And any concrete structure not poured in one hit still risks leaks - especially at hidden joints.
The Val dolphin wall technique began with cheap, hollow, porous concrete blocks as a matrix to support a skin of carefully worked waterproof render. The block matrix itself had relatively light steel concreted into the actual cavities in the blocks at intervals. The proof is, as yet, no cracks. And the leak-free rocks? I suppose this is mostly due to respect for the principles of tension and compression in the structure at the interface, and the clinical care taken in the preparation of the bond between the rock and the masonry.
I recently learned that I was already becoming quite well known around these parts - not just as a crazy pool constructor - but as one with a predilection for working naked.The comfortable air temperature and the remoteness and thus the infrequency of shy visitors was all I needed. Nakedness is more unusual here than in the cold North, and not only for religious reasons, I discovered. As the spring progressed into summer, despite the developing heat, I began spending more time completely covered up. This was not due to developing shyness or the fierce sun - I was managing to work in the shade of the trees surrounding the pool site most of the day - but to wave after wave of different biting insects. The most exciting, though not the most difficult to deal with, were the tábanos - horse-flies. Their wave peaked over just a couple of weeks, and then only during the middle of the day.
To keep cool and keep mortar or concrete damp, I would liberally spray myself and the site with water during the hottest part of the day. This needed to be done every fifteen minutes or so, as it had all evaporated within ten. But horseflies are particularly partial to wet skin....So a routine developed like this. I would spend five minutes spraying self and site with water. Stand with back to wall and swat dozens of horseflies for five minutes. Venture to pick up a tool and work for five minutes. Spend five minutes spraying self and site....
The centipede also has a nasty bite or sting but, apparently, only uses it on humans if provoked. Unlike the horse-fly, it doesn't bite deep between one's shoulder blades just as one begins a precise cut with a power tool that has the temperament of an excited Rotweiler occupying both hands. The centipede in the picture was found hiding beneath the outlet grill of the empty pool, having fallen over the rim and then been unable to climb back up the tiled sides.
I made mistakes of many kinds building this pool, learned a lot, and still managed to produce a winner. It still holds water, it has not cracked, and people enjoy swimming in it and appreciate its character. Peter is proud of it... glad he let me get on with it.... My friend Sue was simultaneously having a (rectangular) swimming pool built a few miles away. Though one who often prefers the simplest solution, she knew how difficult it was to keep cement render or painted pools looking clean and attractive.She had thus invested some energy in coming up with a very cheap local source of tiles and joined with me in persuading Peter that they were worth the extra expense. Sue's tiles were not just seconds but thirds... However, with a bit of over-buying and selection, the appearance was almost as good as any I've seen.Alteration of the design a third of the way through to use tiles meant truing the walls vertically, which for some obscure reason I'd been making with a slight cant outwards up to that point. This led to problems!
As another minimalist trying to conserve his funds, Peter is fortunate in having one of the largest and most reliable springs in the area on his land. Rather than maintain the quality of the same water by natural or artificial means, he prefers to drain and refill the pool as soon as it begins to get a bit murky for healthy swimming. The main problem with this is that as soon as the water gets warm enough for me to swim in, he refills it with freeze-my-bollocks-off fresh water from the spring. I did incorporate a circulating pump, skimmers, a sand filter and a but these seem to have fallen into disuse since I have let go of the project, so I've not learnt any more about their efficacy first hand. The reason he drains and refills the pool, rather than leaving the spring running through it, is that the spring is ten metres below the pool, so the water has to be pumped up!
Ultimately, to the aesthetics and symbolism.... The two most noticeable things about the pool in its environment are its colour and its shape. The colour I accept as being the price of the affordable tiles. Since Chris's pool, I have come to find the turquoise a little too intrusive on the landscape in certain lights. I do, however, still see my initial enthusiasm for the use of the contrasting red earthenware lips to the steps and rim. The shape, as well as tracking the surrounding natural objects, seems appropriate enough in resembling a womb: water being the archetypal womb from which all life on this world probably emerged. This uterus has a ton-up rock forming each of its ovaries. Somehow, though, the cervix, if the path of the submerged steps be the cervix, has got hitched up over the north ovary. Hmm. There are four rocks piercing the structure: the tallest I think of, inexplicably, as the man rock, the roundest as the woman rock. I enjoyed cutting the tiling around all the rocks, and the deepest one has a dolphinesque outline leant to it by this. There is also a flat rock forming part of one of the . As well as the steps, there are also a couple of ledges in the pool which serve as scrambling places, seats, the interfaces of the lower and upper shapes, and contributions to the complexity available for enjoyment.
Based at the here, Peter runs retreat holidays for individuals or small groups. In the warmer months the pool is available for use by those who visit. If you'd like to know more about visiting, see their web site at http://www.alpujarraretreat.co.uk.
