“I’m here in always sunny Coral Gables, Florida at the Venetian Pool, which is a historic public swimming pool that is an astounding 90 years old. Let’s take a look inside.
The Venetian Pool is one of the main tourist attractions of Coral Gables today, even though it opened back in 1924 as the Venetian Casino, but tourists aren’t the only people who use and enjoy it. The local residents also treat it as a great getaway.”
“I hadn’t been here in a number of years and I live really close by, and I wanted to go to the pool and be out in the sun and it was easier than going to the beach. I mean, a pool’s expensive. I bought a home last year so this is obviously a lot more affordable and, you know, for the few times a year I’m gonna go it’s, it makes sense.”
“It’s obvious that this destination is popular but just how popular is it?”
“Year-round, we probably have about sixty to sixty-five thousand guests that come to the pool whether it is to swim or sightsee, but we have about sixty to sixty-five. Out of those sixty, sixty-five maybe about seven to ten thousand are actually Coral Gables's residents.
So you have to think about, in the city of Coral Gables there are no public pools. This is what we would consider our community pool, very fancy community pool. But keep in mind that the pool it’s not just about coming to swim here, it’s also all the benefits and programs that we offer. So we have swim lessons here. It started actually in 59 (1959), it’s a volunteer club of 150 ladies that teach swim lessons. And I have people that come back and they’re now in their seventies and they tell me this is where they learned how to swim. So you can think of probably the majority of the population and not just Coral Gables: South Miami, Kendall, Hialeah…A lot of these people come here to learn how to swim. So I think that is a bigger impact than anything else, than what we have, general admission coming in here is the people that we teach how to swim everyday.”
“Well, safety wise, I don’t know if you guys know, we’ve gotten numerous awards for our safety, we got a couple of awards from Edison associates, which is the people who gave us our license. And we’re ranked one of the top, we got a platinum award from their association. So ranked one of the top safety pools, safest pools in the city.”
“The Venetian pool is certainly a popular landmark, as it is a resource not just for Coral Gables but for Miami-Dade County as a whole. However, like many well-maintained facilities and public parks, there is often a cost.”
“So, the Venetian pool is a community pool in the sense that it is run and operated by the city of Coral Gables. It is budgeted each year, those numbers fluctuate depending on what the needs are. We are set up as an enterprise fund, that means that even though we were budgeted a certain amount we may or may not make a profit. However, in the last couple years we have gone up in numbers. One being that our attendance numbers have increased, our programs have increased. We haven’t raised the prices, so the prices are the same for the last two, three years. However, our revenues have still been increasing.”
“Though it may be costly, people still enjoy the public Venetian Pool for its high value, which encompasses beauty, renovations, history and an overall theme of paradise. All in all, it seems safe to say that the pool is worth it.”