April 2020: Eswatini Added and South Africa Review Finished
In April 2020 we added our first listing in Eswatini, the 206th country in the directory, and finished reviewing South Africa and Germany. The update also lists database statistics as of April 30, 2020.
Eswatini became the directory's 206th country in April 2020, and we completed our reviews of South Africa and Germany. This pool listings update has the details.
Database news
Pools around the world are closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and few people are traveling. We kept finding new pools and updating the listings we already had.
In April we added our first listing in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), which became the 206th country in the directory. At the end of the month we were 19 listings short of 25,000.
We finished reviewing our listings in South Africa. We began with 238, deleted 15 and added 75, a net increase of 60 for the country. We then finished the German federal state of Thuringia, which completed our review of every listing in Germany. From there we moved on to Canada and checked and updated the listings in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
In May we plan to start on Austria and Switzerland, which will likely take more than a month. If we complete both, we will return to Australia to review the states we have not yet covered: South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia.
Open-water swimming
With pools closed, swimmers who live near open water may find Wild Swim useful: it is a worldwide, crowd-sourced map of open-water swimming locations. Local authorities may have closed some rivers, lakes and beaches too, so check for closure notices before you go.
Database statistics
- As of April 30, 2020: the database lists 24,981 swimming facilities in 206 countries and 13,689 cities.
- Pools: those facilities have 27,237 full-size, year-round pools, as we define those terms in our FAQ.
The ten countries with the most listings are:
- United States: 7,656
- United Kingdom: 2,303
- France: 1,590
- Germany: 1,533
- Spain: 1,442
- Italy: 1,122
- Canada: 1,009