Urbanarbolismo has a new cutting edge project – how to have a natural swimming pool water using a VERTICAL garden to filter and purify the water.
Perched high up above Moraira, Alicante, in Spain, is a beautiful and elegant round swimming pool with one of the best views in the world. The steep slope means that for the owners to have a natural vegetation water filter system without chemicals, a vertical garden was the only solution.
The pool has a surface area of 25m², requiring a similarly-sized filtration zone. Urbanarbolismo designed the vertical garden to thrive in Alicante’s climate, using sun-loving water plants like arum lily, reeds, riparian Carex species, Lysimachia, water mint and wetland grasses. It forms part of an overall water purification system with a Kaldnes bacterial filter (that removes harmful nitrite and ammonia from the water) and the layers of gravel and marshland vegetation on the hillside below the pool.
The pool even has herbivorous grass carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella, which eat the algae on the pool’s surface.
I’m also impressed that this pool, unlike so many in Australia and the USA, recognises that swimmers need shade, not just full sun, with motorised shade blinds that can cover both the deck and the pool during high UV periods.