Most Finnish beaches safe for swimming: EEA

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

More than 95 percent of bathing waters in Finland were classified as being of excellent or good quality, which is three percentage points higher than in 2019, said the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in a press release referring to the report on Tuesday.

Five beaches, or about two per cent, were categorised in the lowest acceptable ‘sufficient water quality’ class. In addition, the water quality of four beaches (1.3%) was described as poor.

In Finland, an increasing number of inland and coastal bathing waters have been classified as excellent or good. These two top quality classes included over 97 per cent of all inland beaches.

Nearly 90 per cent of all coastal bathing waters were classified as excellent or good, which is 10 percentage points more than in 2019.

“Unfortunately, the data also includes some beaches with a poor classification. I hope that the cause of contamination on these beaches can be found and that it's possible to take measures to improve the water quality”, said Outi Zacheus, Senior Planning Officer at the THL.

Basic data on individual beaches and bathing water classifications based on monitoring are available on EEA's online service. According to the information gathered in the service, Cyprus, Austria and Greece had the most beaches classified as excellent.

The report on European bathing water quality classifies the quality of bathing water on the beaches where the water’s concentrations of bacteria indicating intestinal contamination have been monitored regularly over four swimming seasons.

The monitoring of bacteria concentrations enables, for example, assessing the impact of wastewater on the bathing water.

The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare reports the results of municipal health protection authorities’ bathing water monitoring to the European Commission annually.

The recently published report is based on the monitoring in the swimming seasons of 2017–2020. The report consolidates country-specific bathing water quality summaries and the monitoring results of altogether 22,000 European beaches.

In the summer of 2020, Finland had a total of 303 public beaches, 225 of which were inland and 78 coastal beaches.