Most Finnish beaches safe for swimming: EEA

It is safe to swim in the waters of public beaches in Finland, according to a bathing water report recently published by the European Environment Agency (EEA).

In the report, most of the Finnish bathing waters, about 92 per cent, were classified as being of excellent or good quality, said the National Institute of Health and Welfare (THL) in a press release quoting the EEA report.

Eight beaches, or approximately three per cent, of Finland’s bathing waters were categorised in the lowest acceptable ‘sufficient water quality’ class. The water quality of only two beaches (0.7%) was described as poor.

In Finland, an increasing number of lakes and rivers have been classified as having excellent or good bathing waters. These two top quality classes included 96 per cent of all inland beaches.

About 80 per cent of the coastal bathing waters were classified as excellent or good. Coastal beaches are subject to stricter limits regarding the amounts of bacteria. This is because bacteria do not survive equally well in salt water, and therefore a smaller amount of bacteria is estimated to reflect the intestinal contamination of the water. However, the same limit values apply to all coastal bathing waters across Europe, so the amounts of bacteria in the low-salinity Baltic Sea and the high-salinity Mediterranean Sea are evaluated using the same criteria.

“In Finland, the coastal bathing waters are not only low-salinity, but the shores are often shallow as well, which may weaken water circulation at the beach and affect the classification of bathing water quality”, said THL Senior Planning Officer Outi Zacheus.

Basic data on individual beaches and bathing water-classes based on monitoring are available on EEA’s online service. According to the information gathered from the service, Cyprus, Austria and Malta have the highest number of beaches classified as excellent.

The online services’ data will not be updated during the upcoming swimming season.

Even though municipal health protection authorities monitor the occurrence of blue-green algae in bathing water in Finland, the abundance or frequency of blue-green algae occurrences is not taken into account when defining bathing water-quality.

However, 15 Finnish beaches have received no quality classification, as the quality of their water had not been monitored for a sufficient period of time or with a sufficient number of samples. Some of these beaches are new, some of them have undergone alterations, and there were not enough samples from some.

The report consolidates country-specific bathing water-quality summaries and the monitoring results of altogether 22,000 European beaches.

In the summer of 2019, Finland had a total of 301 public beaches, 224 of which were inland and 77 coastal.