WLD Data

Greece vs Croatia: bathing water quality in 2025, in numbers

This note works entirely from 1,734 sites in Greece and 1,039 sites in Croatia, the designated bathing sites in the 2025 status dataset — every number below is a direct count or share computed from that published table, not an estimate. See the dataset page for the full schema, the download, and the exact attribution to the European Environment Agency (EEA).

Greece and Croatia are the first two countries in this catalog, both assessed under the same EU Bathing Water Directive and published in the same source file by the EEA, which makes a direct, like-for-like comparison possible without adjusting for different monitoring rules. That comparability is the reason this note exists: the two countries' 2025 snapshots sit side by side below, region by region, using nothing beyond what the published dataset already states.

The 2025 classification distribution

Not every designated site has a class yet: "new" sites haven't built up the seasons of history the directive's method requires, and "not-classified" sites were monitored but didn't return enough valid samples this season. Neither is a quality tier, so a fair "share of excellent" has to be a share of the sites that actually have a class — the classified sites — not of every site in the catalog.

Greece has 1,734 sites sites in total, of which 1,727 sites are classified; the rest, 0.3% new and 0.1% not-classified, don't have a 2025 rating. Among Greece's classified sites, 97.5% are excellent (1,684 sites), 2.4% good, 0.1% sufficient, and 0% poor.

Croatia has 1,039 sites sites in total, but only 926 sites are classified — a much larger slice of the network, 10.5%, is "new", plus 0.4% "not-classified". Croatia's monitoring network grew noticeably between the 2024 and 2025 seasons, and a newly added site cannot carry a class on day one — see the companion note on how classification works for why. Among Croatia's classified sites, the picture is close to Greece's: 96.8% are excellent (896 sites), 2.2% good, 0.6% sufficient, and 0.4% poor. The real difference between the two countries this season isn't water quality — it's how much of each network already carries a class.

Top five regions, by share of excellent sites

Ranking small regions by their share of excellent sites is misleading — a region with only one or two classified sites can swing between zero and full marks from a single rating. This ranking only considers regions with at least 10 classified sites, and the share itself is of classified sites only, for the same reason the country-level numbers above are: a region full of newly added sites shouldn't look "worse" just because few of its sites have a class yet.

In Greece, the five regions with the highest share of excellent sites among their classified sites (among those meeting the threshold) are Ionian Islands (100%, 170 classified sites), North Aegean (100%, 136 classified sites), Central Macedonia (100%, 119 classified sites), Thessaly (100%, 105 classified sites), and Epirus (100%, 34 classified sites).

In Croatia, the top five are Istria County (100%, 208 classified sites), Šibenik-Knin County (100%, 98 classified sites), Zadar County (100%, 27 classified sites), Lika-Senj County (100%, 25 classified sites), and Primorje-Gorski Kotar County (97.7%, 260 classified sites).

Both countries show the same pattern: once a region clears the classified-site threshold, almost every region's excellent share sits in a narrow, high band — the real variation is concentrated in the handful of smaller regions this ranking excludes, and in the newly added sites that haven't earned a rating yet.

What this does and doesn't show

A region's excellent share is a snapshot of one season, not a trend — the companion note on a decade of classifications in both countries looks at how these shares have moved over the years covered by the history dataset. Nothing here is a real-time safety assessment: a site's classification is a rolling evaluation across several seasons, and current conditions on any given day should always be checked against local signage. This note compares only the two countries in this catalog's dataset; it makes no claim about bathing water anywhere else.

It is also worth repeating that "new" and "not-classified" sites are not a fourth or fifth quality tier sitting below "poor" — they are sites the directive's method hasn't rated at all yet, for reasons explained in the companion note on classification. A region or country with a larger share of such sites simply has more recently added monitoring points, which is a fact about the size and age of its network, not about the water quality at the sites that already carry a rating.

Sources and further reading

EU bathing water sites — Greece and Croatia, 2025 status

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Published: 2026-11-14