I started by digging out the Rejuvenation Zone and used some of the soil to fill the gaps between the exterior drystone wall to create planting beds surrounding the pool. The rest of the soil was removed in buckets and stored for future use.

New willing volunteers in the shape of Camille and Julie (Wwoof June 2015), came to help for two weeks. I estimated it would take 3 of us one week to clear the rest of the soil out from the Rejuvenation Zone, but the heat of the day, work slowed down considerably and those two weeks were taken up with little else but digging and shifting the soil to a slowly forming mound just out side of the pool.

Cleaning up the bedrock felt like an archaeological dig, every bit of soil was removed to expose any fissures in the rock. The fissures were cleaned, filled with cement and painted over with Sika 107.

The edges between the walls and the bedrock around the pool were smoothed off with cement and painted with Sika to help retain the water. But the majority of the bed rock was left exposed.

The next step was to take out the central terrace wall. As this wall had originally been a retaining terrace wall, it only had one face and was held together with a lot of earth. I also needed to waterproof under this wall as the clay would not cover that area.

Retaining all the stone and separating it out into sized piles helped a lot when it was time to reconstruct. I had a little help from the rain to wash the soil from the rocks and help from my friends nephew, Jimmy, to reconstruct the wall. Jimmy was very proud by the finished product and went home with the new skill of dry-stone walling. The top stones were cemented into place as this wall would have a lot of use, either to be sat on or walked across as a bridge to the deep-end of the swimming area.

It had been impossible to find a nursery (aquatic or otherwise) in Spain that stocked more than 3 – 4 water-plants. In the end I ordered them in England from Paul Bromfields Aquatics. The only Aquatic nursery that had every plant I on my list. Collecting them in England after my AET course in August 2015 and then taking a week to drive back home to Spain, these plants had to survive in a box wrapped in plastic bags, I did what I could to help them during the journey: always parking in shade and opening the bags as to let as much air circulate around them as possible. It was risky but, it worked out and they all survived.. I was quite amazed at how hardy these plants were, seeing as I had not treated these plants kindly from the start. When I got home, my friend Binky, had come over for a day of potting up some 150 plants, but first, as I had not bought proper aquatic planting baskets, we needed to drill hundreds of holes in the side and bottom of regular pots. These pots of water plants were stored in the little bit of water left in the swimming Zone on a couple of pallets.

Looking back think September was probable the hardest time on the project. I was on a roll, but my volunteers seemed to be overwhelmed by the size of the project. I had to stop work on the pool when my volunteer Neil, from Australia, was here as he had back problems and could not do heavy lifting. Not wanting his skills (good at woodwork) to go to waste, instead we started to design the chicken house, a job that suited his needs and skills a little better.

The arrival of Lisa from the UK and a young French couple, Cami and Remi in October meant work could focus on the pool again and we threw our backs into cementing the capping stones to the wall.

The capping stones that I had been collecting from wherever I could find them on my journeys out and about, always stopping when seeing a nice flat stone on the side of the road. It became a bit of a mission for me to not come home without at least 3 huge stones in the back of my car each time I went out. The steps to enter the Swimming Zone were next. Helped by Lisa, Cami and Remi, they were completed in no time, it would act as a barrier between the Swimming Zone and the Rejuvenation Zone.