In first line to the Las Arenas beach in Valencia, used to exist one of Valencia’s most emblematic places to summer. The swimming pool of Las Arenas was an excursion place for many families who would spend all day there swimming and eating. The Las Arenas swimming pool, which closed its doors at the beginning of the eighties, used to be situated, where today rises one of Valencia’s grand luxury hotels, the hotel Las Arenas. Regardless, it stayed in the memories of many different generations of Valencians, who once enjoyed one of the most popular recreational spaces of Valencia. The Las Arenas swimming pool used to feature a picnic area, restaurants and playgrounds, which is why, after passing the ticket office, families could enjoy a complete day of rest, taking refuge from the summer heat.
Las Arenas used to be, alongside the also disappeared and widely remembered nautical club of Valencia (a building conceived by architect Javier Goerlich), one of the few public swimming pools of the city, which made it a very frequented place and a hotspot for the social relations of that time. The Las Arenas complex was designed by architect Luis Gutiérrez Soto, creator of other popular buildings in Valencia, including the renowned ‘Torre de Valencia’, which we also dedicated a blog post to a while ago.
With a rationalist and functional style, the details of this complex, containing numerous nautical features, were conceived by renowned Valencian architect Cayetano Borso di Carminati. Today the swimming pools, appear, in an altered form, in respect to the original creation by Gutiérrez Soto, integrated in the Hotel Las Arenas, next to neoclassical structures that function as event and convention rooms. Finally, we also want to mention that one of the iconic images of the Las Arenas swimming pool corresponds to a poster created by the Valencian artist Josep Renau in the thirties.
