Most beaches in Europe offer 'excellent' water quality, study says

"This summer we can all reap the benefits of solid implementation of EU bathing water rules, which have made a vast majority of our bathing waters clean enough to swim in," the director of the European Environment Agency (EEA) Leena Yla-Mononen said in a report published Tuesday.

More than 85 percent of bathing sites across the European Union had "excellent" water quality, with Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece, Austria and Croatia standing out with at least 95 percent of their sites classified as "excellent".

Water quality can be classified as "excellent", "good", "sufficient" or "poor", depending on the level of detected faecal contamination.

Polluted waters can, if ingested, cause illness, including gastrointestinal problems and diarrhoea.

Water quality tends to be better in coastal areas rather than inland, thanks to their capacity for self-purification.

The EEA report was based on data from more than 22,000 bathing sites in the 27 EU member states in 2025, as well as non-EU countries Albania and Switzerland.

Only 1.5 percent of bathing sites studied in the report had "poor" water quality.

A total of 89 percent of coastal areas were classified as "excellent", compared to 78 percent of rivers and lakes.

Lakes, rivers and streams are more sensitive to short-term pollution caused by heavy rains and summer droughts.

At the bottom of the table was Albania, where 23.5 percent of its sites were graded as "poor".

If tests show that the water quality at a bathing spot is "poor" for five consecutive years, authorities are required to prohibit swimming at the site.

That was the case for 57 sites from 2020 to 2024: 34 in Italy, 16 in France, three in Spain, two in Sweden and one each in Estonia and Portugal.

Of these, only four had improved to at least "sufficient" quality by 2025.