Editorial policy

WhereToSwim.eu is published by Sevenoways Innovations Limited. Editorial decisions — which spots are listed, how a status is worded, what a page refuses to say — rest with the publisher, not with any of the agencies whose data appears here. We are independent of all of them and endorsed by none of them.

Water-quality classifications, bacterial sample counts, pollution alerts and bathing restrictions are reproduced from the national monitoring body for that country, named on the page where its data appears. We do not sample water, we do not visit these places, and we do not form our own view of whether a beach is clean.

Where a figure is our own calculation rather than an agency’s — a distance, a count, a rainfall-derived caution — the page says so. Attributing our inference to an agency would misrepresent them, which matters more than it sounds: a reader who believes Natural Resources Wales issued a warning acts differently from one who knows a website inferred it.

It will not tell you a beach is safe to swim. Bathing-water monitoring measures bacteria and nothing else; it is silent on tides, rip currents, swell, water temperature and cold-water shock, which are what most often cause harm. A green badge means no warning has been published, which is a different statement from an all-clear, and the wording on every page is chosen to keep those apart.

It will not present the absence of data as good news. Where an agency publishes no incident feed — Wales and Northern Ireland both — the page says so rather than letting silence read as an all-clear.

It will not colour-grade an individual bacterial sample. A classification is a percentile calculated across four bathing seasons, so marking one reading pass or fail would invent a judgement the Bathing Water Directive does not make.

Descriptive text, counts and answers to common questions are assembled from the underlying data rather than written per page, so an answer cannot drift away from the figure it describes as the data updates. Guides and explanatory articles are written rather than generated.

We have deliberately removed machine-generated beach descriptions where they produced near-identical text for neighbouring spots. A sentence that could be about any of four beaches is not information, and an empty section is more honest than a filled one that says nothing.

Monitoring data is re-read from every agency each hour, and each page states when it was last checked and when its information last actually changed — two different facts, kept separate on purpose. Guides carry the date they were last reviewed.

If something here is wrong — a pin in the wrong place, a stale description, a beach missing, a status that does not match the agency’s own page — please tell us at hello@wheretoswim.eu. Anything affecting a safety signal is treated as urgent. Where a correction changes what a page previously said, we say what changed rather than quietly editing it.

The site carries advertising and may carry affiliate links and paid business listings. None of it touches the safety information. A business can be featured near a spot; a spot is never presented as safe, cleaner or better because somebody paid. Advertising is kept visually and structurally separate from the water-quality badge, and automatic ad placement is switched off specifically so that an ad cannot be placed beside it.

No agency, council, tourism body or advertiser has any say over a classification, a warning or a status shown on this site.

How we know sets out every data source with its licence, how the swim status is calculated, and seven explicit limitations — the things this site cannot tell you.