The overall quality of bathing water in the European Union has improved significantly with the implementation first of Directive 76/176/EEC and then Directive 2006/7/EC, which is now being implemented. Around 85% of coastal and inland bathing waters have been consistently classified as "excellent quality" in recent years.

 

In 2022, 21,973 points were monitored in the European Union, 66.1% of which belong to coastal waters, which, on average, are of better quality than inland waters. 88,8% of the European Union's coastal waters are classified as "excellent quality", while 79.2% of inland waters are of similar quality. The largest number of monitored bathing waters is in Italy (5,529) and France (3,370). Greece, together with Cyprus, Austria and Croatia, are the countries in Europe for which at least 95% of bathing waters are classified as "excellent quality".

 

At national level, according to the 2022 results, the majority of coastal and inland bathing waters meet the minimum requirements for classification as bathing waters of "excellent quality" set by Directive 2006/7/EC. Furthermore, based on the latest European Union assessment of the quality of coastal waters in Greece, 98.7% have been classified as "excellent quality", 1.0% have been classified as "good quality", only 0.3% have been classified as "sufficient quality", and no coastline has been classified as "insufficient quality".

The graphs show that Greece complies with the mandatory and indicative values of Directive 76/160/EEC and Directive 2006/7/EC, as it appears that the majority of coastal bathing waters are of excellent quality.

 

Furthermore, inland waters show steep fluctuations in quality due to the small number of monitored sites (6 sites the maximum number of monitoring sites over the entire 1990-2022 assessment period, with 3 sites monitored from 2017 to date). However, in inland waters, Greece has been in 100% compliance with the mandatory values of Directive 76/160/EEC since 1998, with the exception of the years 2006, 2007 and 2009, when 66.7% compliance was achieved. Since the year 2010, Directive 2006/7/EC has been implemented with inland bathing waters being of excellent quality in the last assessment years.

 

Greece is in full compliance with the requirements of Directive 2006/7/EC for bathing waters, with a percentage of bathing waters of excellent quality exceeding 95% in the last four years.