If you prefer swimming in a pool to bathing in the sea, you might want to reconsider any future Greek vacation plans. A two-year-long drought in Greece is prompting soul-searching about water management that could now result in swimming pools across the island nation’s resorts being filled with seawater.
New legislation being considered in parliament proposes to regulate how coastal hotels receive water for their pools and would entail the installation of pipelines to pump in seawater for guests. “This (legislation) regulates the framework for carrying out seawater extraction and pumping it for swimming pools,” Elena Rapti, a deputy minister of tourism told a parliament committee, adding “The focus, of course, is to conserve water resources.”
Annual rainfall down by between 12% and 20%
Like other parts of southern Europe (and elsewhere), Greece is suffering from a prolonged lack of rainfall, making everyday water use a challenge and drying out the land to a tinderbox state that has seen wildfires ravage many areas over successive summers.
Annual precipitation is now roughly 12% less than it was between 1901 and 1970, a National Observatory study has found. Some places, such as Crete and the Aegean Islands, including popular holiday destinations like Kos, Lesbos and Santorini, are among the driest – having lost 20% of their rainfall.
As in parts of Spain and Portugal, the water management problem is contributing to protests about overtourism, as locals complain that precious resources are being diverted to serve frivolous and ecologically unsound purposes. Last year, Portugal launched a campaign to encourage visitors to save six suitcases of water by using the sea and rivers to take a dip in and clean off.
Chemically-treated water pumped back into the sea?
Some welcome any moves to make the tourism industry, which attracted 33 million visitors in 2024 and contributed 28.5 billion euros to the Greek economy, more sustainable. But others are questioning how effective the new legislation will be. Under the proposal it would not be obligatory for hotels to replace their pool water with seawater but instead the planning permissions needed to do so would be easier to obtain.
Criticism has also centred on the fact that there are no rules about water quality in the plan. Swimming pool water, whether it comes from the sea or not, is supposed to be chemically treated to make it safe to bathe in. This treated water would then be pumped back out to sea, with potentially toxic chemicals and even, some say, sewage, impacting marine life.