FINA World Swimming Championship 2003 – Barcelona

For the first time in its history, Palau Sant Jordi (Barcelona, Spain) hosted a floating pool in 2003, which was a big innovation project. It was the largest floating facility in the world of its time: 50 x 25 meters, two meters deep and 2,500 cubic meters of capacity. The pool in question was removable. Not a single nail was used as everything was assembled and disassembled. Fluidra began designing it in 2001 with an eye toward the Barcelona Swimming World Championships. A total of 150 galvanized steel panels, secured with reinforcement cables, allowed the swimming competitions and the men's water polo final and semifinal to be played at Sant Jordi. A pool without waves. "Either you take advantage of what you already have or you create new infrastructures, which entail a very high investment of money for some world cups. In this case, we believed that using a floating pool, the cost and assembly time would be much lower, which means that the sustainability of the project is much greater than in a conventional assembly. The pool, which has five patents, was the first of its kind to be made in the world", said Xavi Vila, technical director of Fluidra Engineering Services. "The greatest benefit for swimmers is that they are almost undisturbed when they swim," said Vila. To do this, ropes were designed with turbines inside, which dissipates the wave energy caused by swimmers. The facility also had a water treatment system, made up of eight monoblocks that filtered and disinfected the water, which was at a temperature of 26 degrees.