"Barcelona will train more athletes in the Olympic discipline of springboard diving thanks to the recovery of the Escullera pool." Bernat Antràs, president of the Club Natació Barcelona (CNB), expresses this forcefully when explaining the comprehensive remodeling project of the facilities of the centenary sports entity.
The Escullera pool "is in the imagination of many Barcelonans, many learned to swim in it", until it was closed in 2007. Inaugurated in 1924, it was the first indoor pool in Spain and the first in the world with tempered seawater, and "we are recovering it so that it can once again be a sporting reference point for the city", adds Antràs. When the renovation is completed, presumably by the end of 2023, it will be the only indoor diving pool in the city of Barcelona, since currently this sport can only be practiced in the open-air Municipal Pools of Montjuïc, or in the High Performance Sports Center of Sant Cugat, if indoors.
The CNB's proposal is that the facility give new impetus to the sports sections of the Club Natació, from water polo, swimming, synchronized swimming,... and especially in the Olympic modality of springboard diving, becoming a place for the practice of this sport in all its aspects: initiation, promotion, training, and competition.
But they also want to open it to the city and its area of influence. "We will establish collaboration agreements with sports entities in Barcelona and other towns so that federated members can use the facility for their training," as has happened throughout the history of the pool and the club.
"Like at home"
This awakens the nostalgia of members and non-members who trained as athletes in the Escullera pool, which is 33 meters long by 14 meters wide, with the option of closing it to create a 25-meter pool for some competitions and a smaller 14-meter long one. Swimmers like Pepi Solé and Esther Eroles explain that "the pool, and with it the CNB, was our second home for many years".
"We all carry this pool in our hearts; we have poured all our feelings into it," explains swimmer Pepi Solé, daughter of one of the Club Natació's swimming coaches, who learned to swim in that pool, where she also trained and at eight years old began to participate in Catalonia's swimming championships, becoming Spanish champion in 4x100 medley in 1958. She competed for about 16 years and later—after a personal hiatus—was a swimming instructor and later a coach for Olympic athletes such as Iñaki Aguilar, Adrià Delgado, and Anna Godoy. Therefore, "I have been linked to the Escullera pool all my life."
The new facility will be the city's only indoor pool for the springboard diving discipline"Since we were the only club in the city that had an indoor pool, we excelled in many sports disciplines and had a lot of activity," comments Solé, explaining that it became an essential place for many elite athletes.
For her part, Paralympic athlete Esther Eroles, who won four silver medals at the Seoul Paralympic Games in 1988, joined the CNB in 1992 when the entity started the adapted swimming section. Once at the club, she continued in national and international competitions until 1995, with the European Championship in Perpignan. "Since then, my connection with the club has been maintained because I started as an athlete and when my career ended, I took on instructor tasks in the same Escullera pool," states Eroles, who has been able to combine it with her profession as an engineer, "thanks to personal and friendly relationships with other club members." "If you look at it coldly, all the job opportunities in my life have arisen thanks to Natació Barcelona." She has been involved in many tasks, such as the first Spanish adapted swimming championship held at the club in 2008.
"The Club Natació awakens a sense of belonging; there are members who arrive before it opens in the mornings, there are entire families who enjoy the facilities, who spend the weekend..." explains this Paralympic medalist.
Now, Eroles is involved in another job: bringing together many athletes from the Club's water sections. They are organizing, for next March 26, a photograph with all the athletes of the entity who have competed for the CNB and have used the Escullera pool, whether it is the case of sections such as water polo, swimming, adapted swimming, diving, synchronized swimming (now artistic swimming) or triathlon training and competing, like the athletics section, forming part of the Atleta Complet.
Between Fluidra and Myrtha
In the first quarter of 2022, a part of the future of the new Escullera pool will vanish, when the company that must build the new facility is chosen. In competition, for now, the Catalan Fluidra and the Italian Myrtha Pools, which already has a link with the CNB for years because, among other actions, it was in charge of the construction of the Nova Escullera Olympic pool, 50 meters long, in 2003. The chosen firm will be in charge of all the necessary works in the five pools that the club has, within the global reform project of its infrastructures on Paseo de Joan de Borbó, which foresees an investment of 12 million euros in collaboration with the British group Green Track.
The international firms in the pool sector Fluidra and Myrtha have presented their projectsTechnical and economic criteria will determine who carries out the reform, which also has an important part of civil works, for which a bid will also be held. On the CNB board of directors' table there are three proposals. The construction companies Rubau, Construcia and a UTE formed by VOPI 4 and Certis have presented themselves.
Among the conditions is maintaining the art déco style with which architect Jaume Mestres – who during the 1920s of the last century was vice-president of the CNB – designed the Escullera pool. A truly advanced design for that era, and thanks to engineer Manuel Folch, from the Erebus company, it heated the pool water. Club Natació Barcelona has its origins in 1907 when a group of swimmers, led by Bernat Picornell, founded it at Gimnàs Solé and, a few years later, managed to rent the Banys d'Orient i de San Sebastián in Barceloneta, and then after the Barcelona Port Works Board granted them the use of premises at the beginning of the Levante breakwater, behind the historic Nuevo Vulcano workshops. There, in 1920, Jaume Mestres designed the Escullera pool, because Barcelona wanted to bid to host the 1924 Olympic Games which, finally, were held in Paris.