What color is the water in the Baltic?

Is the Baltic sea water as dark as the one of the Black sea? Or is it more clear like Mediterranean? Or milk-like like in Balaton?

When is the Black Sea dark? When I've been (late april to late september) in the sun it's light green with bluish highlights...

In my much more limited experience the Baltic is a similar (but less clear) green in the sun in the summer

Both the Black Sea and Baltic are semi-lakes and not that salty (the Black Sea seems a bit saltier than the Baltic though).

The Mediterranean is more intensely salty and blue in the sun.

No. It's very shallow and doesn't have the famous Black Sea undercurrents.

So it's safer for swimmers than the black sea?
And why is Balaton so light colored when it's lake? Does Poland have similar lakes? Morske Oko? Can you swim there?

Balaton is muddy (the name is derived from a slavic word for mud - błotno in Polish)

The Baltic and Black Seas are similar to lakes since they're mostly surrounded by land with only relatively narrow channels to the open sea (or ocean)


No. There is the Mazurian lake district which you might like..

Some parts of the Baltic coast are dangerous to swim in. In others, you will find swimmers. As seas go however, it is a dirty one and cold.

I tried it once after years of swimming in the Adriatic. I was in Darłowo visiting friends, and it was a week of 30c weather. Perfect time to try swimming, right?

Got in, and it was cold and disgusting. The water temperature in the height of summer was around 19c, it clearly wasn't clean, and the beach was packed with idiots with their parawany. Never again.

The few beaches in Poland are quite poor.
The water is quite dirty, on a Mediterranean level but always very cold too.

So do Poles just go to Italy, Croatia and Slovenia?

The classic big 5 (in no particular order) are Egypt, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Spain (with Croatia gaining in recent years) Italy is a bit behind (maybe because it's more expensive). I was in Sardinia a couple of years ago and loved it, but local transport was either really inconvenient or very expensive.

Cyprus and Portugal and Malta are all also popular. Tunisia was very popular before the terror attacks and Morocco is maybe creaping into the picture) as are maybe Albania and Georgia.

No one goes to Slovenia for beaches... how much coastline do they have, 20 meters?

Dubai is getting popular now (pre-covid) with those who can afford it. The list above still stands, however a lot depends on which destination is being marketed by the big travel agents here. Crete is a popular destination due to low-cost resorts around Chania.

It is green. And cool.

Why did Czechs change their preferences and travel to the Baltic seaside more in recent years?

"Poland is the new Croatia" - writes the Czech media about the growing interest of Czechs in holidays in Poland. This year, as many as half a million of our southern neighbors could have chosen a vacation on the Baltic Sea. - Generally, Poland has decent hotels, water parks, theme parks, modern museums, philharmonics. This makes a big impression on Czechs. They sit in a pub and tell each other that they went to Poland with fears, but it turned out to be great - says Pavel Trojan, director of the Foreign Center of the Polish Tourist Organization in Prague.
Michał Banasiak: Where were you on vacation this year?

Pavel Trojan: First in Neum, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And then in Świnoujście.

So, both the Adriatic and the Baltic. How do they compare?

It takes about 12 hours to get to Bosnia from the Czech Republic. It's 30 degrees every day there. In the afternoon you're so exhausted by the sun that you don't want to leave the guesthouse. Without air conditioning, there's no chance of falling asleep. We drove to the Polish seaside with my family for about 6.5 hours. The weather is much more bearable. You can walk, ride a bike. You can also swim, although for my wife - a Serb - the Baltic Sea is too cold for swimming. I, on the other hand, say that the Adriatic is too warm.

Today it was green-black and choppy, but visibility was very good.