Greece retains one of Europe’s cleanest coastlines, according to the European Environment Agency’s annual bathing-water assessment for 2024.
The report, released jointly with the European Commission on Friday, shows that 97 percent of Greece’s monitored coastal and inland sites met the “excellent” quality standard, placing the country third in the 29-nation survey behind Cyprus and Bulgaria.
Inspectors sampled more than 22,000 locations across the 27 EU member states, Albania and Switzerland, classifying them as excellent, good, sufficient or poor on the basis of bacterial pollution linked chiefly to wastewater and agricultural run-off.
Across the bloc, 85% of sites achieved the highest grade, while 96% reached at least the mandatory quality threshold and only 1.5% failed altogether.
EU Water Quality / Source: European Environmental Agency
Cyprus topped the list with 99.2% of its bathing waters rated as excellent, followed by Bulgaria with 97.9%, Greece with 97%, Austria with 95.8% and Croatia with 95.2% . At the opposite end, only 16% of waters in Albania and 58.1% in Poland were deemed “excellent.”