The report, published last Thursday, evaluates water quality at over 22,000 designated bathing sites across all EU member states, as well as Albania and Switzerland.
It focuses on levels of bacteria that can pose health risks, helping swimmers identify well-managed and safe locations.
Only 58.1 percent of Poland’s 764 monitored bathing areas were rated as having “excellent” water quality — the lowest proportion in the EU.
An additional 13 percent were rated “good,” 6 percent “sufficient,” and 2.6 percent “poor.”
Data was unavailable for over 20 percent of sites, often due to insufficient sampling.
Only Albania, a non-EU country included in the survey, performed worse overall.
By contrast, the EU average for “excellent” sites stood at 85.4 percent, and just 1.5 percent of all bathing waters across the bloc were found to be of poor quality.
The best performing countries were Cyprus (99.2 percent of sites rated excellent), Bulgaria (97.9 percent), and Greece (97 percent), followed by Austria and Croatia, where over 95 percent of sites reached the top rating.
At the other end of the scale, Poland was joined by Estonia (61.5 percent), Hungary (67 percent), and Belgium (69.2 percent) in the bottom tier.
Within Poland, the Pomorskie and Wielkopolskie regions showed the cleanest results, with nearly all bathing sites rated as excellent.
The poorest results were in the Łódzkie region, where 17 percent of sites had water rated as poor.
The EEA stressed that Europe’s overall water quality has improved significantly in recent decades, thanks to investments in wastewater treatment and rigorous monitoring procedures introduced under the EU’s 2006 Bathing Water Directive.
Each bathing site is required to follow a monitoring schedule, including a pre-season sample and at least three to four samples during the bathing season, with no more than a month between checks.
The assessment focused specifically on the presence of Escherichia coli (E. coli) and intestinal enterococci — bacteria that signal contamination by sewage or manure and can cause serious illness.
Chemical pollutants such as pesticides, heavy metals, or microplastics were not part of the evaluation.
An interactive version of the map, allowing users to check individual sites, is available on the EEA’s website.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP