All the bathing sites in Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Malta had excellent water quality. These countries were followed by Greece (97%), Croatia (94%) and Germany (90%), all having a high proportion of sites with excellent bathing water quality. Across Europe, just under 2% of bathing sites failed to meet the Bathing Water Directive’s minimum standards for water quality and were rated ‘poor’.

The results are from the annual bathing water quality report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the European Commission, which compares the quality of bathing water sampled at more than 21 000 coastal and inland bathing sites across the EU, Switzerland and Albania in 2014. Alongside the report, the EEA has published an interactive map showing the performance of each bathing site.

Hans Bruyninckx, EEA Executive Director, said: “I am glad to see that the quality of Europe’s bathing waters is consistently very high and continues to improve. It shows that policies work and contribute to our quality of life when they are ambitious, well-defined and well-implemented.”

Ninety-five per cent of the monitored bathing sites in the European Union met minimum standards for water quality in 2014. Water quality was excellent at 83 % of the sites, an increase of almost 1 percentage point compared to 2013.