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Is the tap water safe to drink in Spain?

Spain travel advice: can you drink the tap water everywhere in the country?

One of the things that most worries people when they go to another country is whether or not it is safe to drink the tap water or whether they will have to buy bottled water.

In many cases, this is something that it's mostly only the locals who live in that place who know but in the case of Spain it is easy to find out.

As a modern European country with first-world water facilities and pipes, the answer is yes, the tap water in Spain is perfectly safe to drink.

All water that comes out of the faucet in a Spanish home has been specially treated to prepare it for human consumption and is 100% potable.

Unless marked otherwise, the taps in hotels, bars and public spaces also have water that you can drink.

Did you know? Spanish restaurants are legally obliged to give you free tap water

That said, depending on where you are in Spain the water may taste a bit funny if it has a high chalk content. This doesn't mean the water is unsafe to drink, but simply that it could have a different flavour and composition than you might be used to. In these areas, such as in Almería, you may be actively advised to buy bottled water instead of drinking tap water. Indeed, there are times when the supply of water in ground wells can get so low it becomes radioactive and genuinely dangerous to health, but those episodes are few and far between, and always signalled by the appropriate authorities.

Even so, if you have any doubts about the water where you are or you are a person who has a particularly delicate stomach when it comes to unfamiliar food and drinks, you might want to play it safe and buy bottled water anyway.

In some parts of Spain you can purchase large 8-litre bottles of water for less than a euro, which is the most cost-effective way to do it. As such, buying bottled water to drink in Spain will not break the bank, though it does create more plastic waste.

Remember, on the whole it is not necessary to buy bottled water because the tap water is safe to drink in Spain.

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