Coastal vs inland bathing water rated excellent in Europe (2025)
Across the EU, last year's bathing water quality was altogether first-class. Looking at the coastal-inland water divide, the Mediterranean favors coastal waters, while in the Nordics and Estonia the lakes are cleaner than the sea.
Source: European Environment Agency — European bathing water quality in 2025
Summer is finally here, and as more and more people flock to vacation in Europe, I thought it might be interesting to see the divide in the quality of inland and coastal water.
As per the European Environment Agency, the quality of water across the European Union was altogether first-class, with 85% scoring in the excellent category.
What does this mean in practice? Well, to be blunt, it's not the complete picture since there are limitations to the monitoring. All in all, the water should be and for the most part is clean enough to swim in without worry.
When looking at the data, I decided to focus on the coastal-inland water divide, and as a result the graph excludes landlocked countries and countries with only one type of water body.
This still leaves us with 17 countries, five of which are on the Mediterranean (counting the Adriatic Sea), six on the Baltic Sea, four on the North Sea, and two on the Atlantic.
The graph below shows only the top 'excellent' category, as I found that including the others in the visualization created too much noise.
Coastal vs inland bathing water rated excellent in Europe (2025)
Each row is a country. The dots mark the share of its bathing waters rated "Excellent" in the 2025 season, blue for coastal sites, green for inland (lakes and rivers). The line between them is the gap.
In ten out of the 17 countries,the share of excellent coastal water quality was higher compared to the inland water quality.
Slovenia is the winner here, with the biggest difference of 42.9% in favor of the coast. Next in line are Spain (+38.1%), Portugal (+33.2%) and Croatia (+32.8%).
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Finland (+39.6%), Estonia (+31.4%), Sweden (+7.8%) and Belgium (+6.6%) had inland water quality prevailing over the coast by the most points. Ireland, Denmark and Italy were apparently in a state of equilibrium, with the closest gap.
To sum it up, the coastal water was of better quality on the Mediterranean, while the Baltic and North Sea countries had cleaner inland waters.
Now, to the limitations of the monitoring! Per the EEA, "the BWD focuses on monitoring E. coli and intestinal enterococci, key indicators of faecal contamination that signal risks to human health due to the potential presence of pathogens."
It's important to note that the BWD's quantitative monitoring requirements don't include toxic cyanobacterial blooms or chemical pollutants in groundwater and surface water. This unfortunately can give us an incomplete picture, and even if swimming in excellently graded water, swimmers might never know something else was wrong with it.
Countries reporting only one kind of site are left off the chart: coastal-only Cyprus, Malta, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania, and inland-only Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia.