Do I need a permit to build a swimming pool?

The short answer is that it depends, and it is worth understanding what it depends on, because the mistake runs in both directions: some people build without a permit a pool that needed one, and others spend months on a procedure that in their case was not required at all.

The three questions that decide

1. 1Where? Urban land, rural land, or a property under propiedad horizontal.
2. 2On what? Open ground, an existing slab, a terrace, a roof.
3. 3What does it touch? Structure, common property, watercourse buffer, setbacks.

Those three answers settle almost any case. Let us take them one at a time.

A pool in the garden of a house

It is the commonest case and the one that generates most argument. A built pool on the open ground of a property is a new building on an unbuilt area, and that is exactly the definition of the new build modality: the authorisation to carry out building works on unbuilt land.

Even though the national rule does not name it, a built pool occupies land, has a structure, has water and drainage services and alters the ground. That is why, in most municipalities, it is processed as construction.

And there are three things in the POT, the municipal land-use plan, that can decide it, all of them municipal:

• —Whether the pool counts towards the site coverage ratio. Some land-use plans exclude uncovered hard surfaces; others say nothing. If it counts and you are already at the limit, the project changes.
• —The setbacks. The pool has to respect the distances to the boundaries like any other building, and on a small plot that is usually the restriction that governs.
• —The enclosure and any roof over it, if you are going to build them. An enclosure has a permit modality of its own, and a roof over the pool is built area.

A pool on a terrace or over a slab: the serious case

Here no ambiguity is possible. Putting water on a slab that was not designed for it is a structural intervention, and structural interventions have a permit modality of their own.

One metre depth of water weighs a tonne per square metre, and to that you have to add the shell, the lining, the coping and the live load. No housing slab is designed for that load unless somebody decided so in advance.

A pool in propiedad horizontal

If the pool is to go in a common area of a community of owners — propiedad horizontal, the Colombian regime that splits a development into private units and property held in common — two things are needed at once, and they are cumulative: the authorisation of the general meeting, because common property is being altered, and the building permit in whichever modality applies. Neither replaces the other.

And if the pool is to go on the private terrace of a flat, remember that the roof slab is essential common property even when it sits inside your own private unit. The terrace is yours to use; the slab that holds it up is not.

A pool on rural land

To all of the above the environmental regime is added, and it is usually what decides:

• —The watercourse buffer. Thirty metres on each side of a watercourse and a hundred around a spring. It is protected land: the pool does not go there, covered or uncovered.
• —The water to fill it. If it comes from a source of your own — a borehole, a stream, a spring — a water concession from the corporación autónoma regional, the regional environmental authority, is needed. It is not a detail: it is a procedure.
• —The water to empty it. With no public sewer, the discharge requires a permit or an approved treatment system. Emptying a pool into a stream is an environmental offence, not a maintenance decision.
• —The site coverage ratio. On rural and suburban land there are national limits on coverage that apply to everything built on the property taken together.

What applies even if you need no permit

This is the part that surprises most, and where most people go wrong in good faith. Ley 1209 de 2008, the statute on pool safety, does not depend on your having obtained a permit. It applies by the fact of having a pool, and it applies to pools already built.

The drain: the decision that cannot be put right later

If you are going to build a new pool, this is decided now, or it is never decided without opening the shell again.

When a body seals a suction outlet, the working pressure of the pump turns into holding force, and with a single drain of ordinary diameter that force runs to hundreds of kilograms. No adult pulls a child off it.

The correct solution is passive: hydraulically balanced twin suction outlets, with the drains at least 0.90 m apart. If a body seals one, the other goes on admitting flow and the vacuum never forms. It does not depend on electronics, it cannot lose its settings and it has no battery.

What happens if you build without the permit you needed

The consequence is not only the fine. Works without a permit expose you to a financial penalty, to an order of demolition and to the cutting off of public utilities. And there are two less visible effects that usually hurt more:

• —Selling the property. Built area that appears neither in the permit nor in the by-laws is a problem at the moment of selling or of mortgaging.
• —Insurance. A claim on a structure built without a permit is a different conversation with the insurer.

The right sequence

1. 1Make the verbal enquiry at the curaduría or at the planning office. It is free. Take the address of the property and describe what you want to do and where.
2. 2If it is going over an existing slab, ask for the structural assessment first. Before any pool design at all.
3. 3If it is a community of owners, ask the general meeting for authorisation before the permit. Paying the permit charges for something you are not allowed to do is money lost.
4. 4If it is rural, start with the corporación autónoma regional. Watercourse buffer, water and discharges.
5. 5Design the hydraulic system at the same time as the shell. Drains, plant room, pipework and pump. It is what cannot be seen and it is what decides whether the pool works.
6. 6Comply with Ley 1209 from the design stage, not as an addition at the end.

A swimming pool is above all what cannot be seen. The permit is the procedure; the system is the project.