Malta ranked ninth in Europe for overall bathing water quality and tenth for coastal bathing water quality, a new report by the European Environment Agency (EEA) has found.

The report found that 88.5% of Malta’s 87 official bathing sites were rated as having excellent water quality, while 9.2% were classified as good and 2.3% as sufficient.

This means Malta’s bathing water quality ranked just above the EU coastal water average of 88%.

However, it is worth noting that a number of other Mediterranean countries achieved better results. Coastal bathing water quality was rated 100% in Cyprus and Slovenia, 97.1% in Greece, 91.2% in Spain, 90.2% in Italy, and 90.1% in Portugal.

On the other hand, Malta did rank better than Croatia (87.6%), France (76.4%) and Albania (15.9%).

Under EU law, bathing water quality is classified as excellent, good, sufficient, or poor on the basis of a multi sample assessment of microbiological results, specifically E.coli and intestinal enterococci.

From a public health perspective, consistent “excellent” and “good” classifications indicate a sustained very low risk of contamination from faecal contamination, reflecting stable environmental conditions and effective pollution control.

In contrast, repeated "sufficient" and "poor" classification represents the minimum acceptable level of protection, signalling that the water meets health based standards.