Spain's cleanest beaches: 36 years of EU water tests

By the EU's own tests, Spain's cleanest beaches are the 246 whose water was graded excellent in all 36 seasons from 1990 to 2025. In 2025, 91.4 % of the country's 2,018 bathing points were excellent. The points fall into 31 areas — provinces, islands, and Ceuta and Melilla — and in 7 of them every single point was excellent.

Below: where these numbers come from, where the water is worse, what has changed since the 1990s, and how this grade differs from the Blue Flag. Every figure is computed from the European Environment Agency's database, point by point.

What «excellent» means, and what it does not

The grade comes from water samples, not from how the beach looks. The rules are set by EU Directive 2006/7/EC. Samples are tested for two kinds of gut bacteria: E. coli and intestinal enterococci. Each season needs at least four samples, the first shortly before the season starts, and never more than a month between them.

The grade is worked out from the samples of the last four seasons. It describes several summers, not one day, and a bad summer stays in the sum for three more years. For sea water, «good» allows twice the bacteria that «excellent» does. Below «sufficient» comes «poor». The directive on EUR-Lex.

What the grade does not tell you: the sand, the August crowds, the parking, the view. It says one thing: how many of those bacteria turn up in the water where people swim. For a «best beaches» list that is not everything. But it is measured the same way on every official beach in the country.

The Blue Flag is something else

The Blue Flag is a voluntary programme for beaches, marinas and tourism boats, run by the Foundation for Environmental Education. Its criteria cover six areas: water quality is one, next to education, safety, accessibility and how the site itself is managed. A flag goes to sites that take part in the programme and meet its requirements. The programme's criteria.

The EU grade works the other way round. Nobody signs up for it: the state names every bathing site each year and samples each one. We do not hold the Blue Flag data, so this article counts no flags. A missing flag says nothing about the water. The grade does.

Province by province, 2025

Each bathing point belongs to a province or island by the code in its ID. Below are all 31 areas, from the highest share of excellent points to the lowest. Only points graded in 2025 count.

Every point is excellent in Almería, Ceuta, El Hierro, Huelva, La Gomera, La Palma and Málaga. At the bottom of the table are Bizkaia (61.8 %), Ibiza and Formentera (66.7 %) and Mallorca (68.1 %). But «poor» has little to do with it: of their 65 points below excellent, 49 are graded good. That is the second of four grades: the samples carry more bacteria than excellent allows, but stay within the limit for good.

Excellent for 36 seasons running

Today's grade separates little: excellent is almost everywhere. History does. 931 points were already graded in 1990 and are still graded today. Of those, 268 were excellent in every one of the 36 seasons, with no gap. They sit on 246 beaches, and that is the strictest list of clean beaches these data can give.

These 6 areas hold 142 of the 246 beaches. In 7 areas there are none at all, for different reasons. In El Hierro and Fuerteventura, no current point was graded back in 1990, so 36 seasons could not add up. In the rest (Cantabria, Ceuta, Huelva, La Gomera and Melilla) old points exist, but each one missed excellent at least once. That includes Ceuta, Huelva and La Gomera, where every point was excellent in 2025. A perfect score today and a long clean record are different things.

Where the water was poor in 2025

In 2025, 16 points on 14 beaches were graded poor. With that grade the directive requires action, including a bathing ban or advice against bathing. If a site stays poor for five years in a row, the ban or the advice becomes permanent.

Names are as in the European register: where it has no accents, neither do we. Of the 14, 2 are river points rather than sea beaches: their register names begin with «Rio». «Poor since» is the first season of the current run. Other grades came before it, so the last column shows how many poor seasons the point has had in its whole record.

Has it got cleaner

In 1990, 977 points were graded; in 2025, 2,018. A share taken over all points would compare different beaches, so we compare only points graded in both seasons, and only within one scale.

Most of the change came on the old test: at the same points, poor grades numbered 116 in 1990 and 5 in 2010. On the new test, the excellent share rose by 4.6 points over 14 seasons. Slower growth, but there is little room left.

Beaches in the places we cover

123 of our places have bathing points graded in 2025: the beaches of the same municipality. At 90 of them, every point is excellent. Below are the places with the most beaches excellent in all 36 seasons: the first 8 by that count, plus those tied with the last one. Alongside: how many months a year the sea is above 20 °C.

A dash in the sea column marks a place on the Mar Menor lagoon. The satellite grid sees the open sea beyond the sandbar, not the lagoon water, so its sea months are not measured.

How long the swimming season lasts, month by month, is in a separate piece. Clean water and warm water are different questions, and different data answer them. The swimming season, place by place.

Further

The grade of every point for every season, tied to our places, is in our bathing water dataset. The islands, with full data for each place: Mallorca, Ibiza, Gran Canaria. The mainland: Costa de Almería, Costa Cálida, Costa Blanca. The agency's source data.

Three islands are worked through beach by beach: Mallorca, Ibiza with Formentera, and Tenerife.

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