Hope Cove
WaterFit Live
Hope Cove
Hope Cove consists of two sandy bays, Inner and Outer Hope. As the name suggests Inner Hope is more sheltered and is home to a small harbour tucked away behind the rocks at the northern end.
The northernmost beach is generally the more popular of the two, benefitting from a seasonal lifeguard service.
Both beaches are sandy and backed by the red sandstone cliffs familiar to this part of Devon. The wider harbour beach is a great place for exploring with rockpools at either end and often has something interesting going on.
Both beaches back onto the charming village which has plenty of facilities making it a popular family destination.
Overflow locations
The map below shows the locations of the storm overflows that have the potential to impact water quality at this bathing water.
The map shows whether or not a storm overflow is currently active, the time and duration of the last spill at that location, and our investment commitments that are specific to that overflow.
Hope Cove storm overflow map
Water quality sample results
The graphs below show the significant reduction in harmful bacteria in the Environment Agency’s (EA) water samples since the 1990s. E. coli and Intestinal Enterococci exist in all open water - they are found in human and animal poo, and get into the water via sewage spills, road drainage, agricultural livestock, or wildlife and birds. The EA uses the levels of these bacteria to decide whether to award this beach bathing water status.
Investment programme up to 2025
In March 2023 we installed a large storm water tank at Galmpton sewage treatment works alongside upgrading the pumping station at Inner and Outer Hope Cove to pass additional flows into the works.
Total investment of £2,500,000 includes catchment infiltration reduction as well as improvements across all three overflows to remove the volume of water in the network and therefore helps reduce the need for storm overflows to operate.
We will continue to look at what further work would be beneficial after the initial work is complete. During prolonged rainfall in the winter, we can see that there seems to be other water coming into our network. This could be rain or ground water and may arise from wrong connections into our network. We are working to identify these misconnections although we do not see this in drier winters and so they can be difficult to find. We will look at what work is required to address the issues found. Reducing non-sewage related wastewater from the network helps reduce the need for storm overflows to operate.
The 2025-2030 investment programme is currently being scoped out. If you’re a community group or part of a local network and would like to have your say see ‘Your Beach, Your Say, Our Investment’.
4 year overflow spill information
The data shown in the table below is the reported annual total spill number for each overflow which has been identified by the EA for this bathing water.
The assignment of an overflow to the bathing water does not always mean an impact will occur, it can be dependent on a number of factors such as tidal state and weather conditions. Sometimes it has been allocated just for investigation purposes and has no impact at all.
All data collected goes through vigorous quality assurance processes before being included in the counts. Sometimes debris can trigger false spills to be recorded, resulting in potentially higher than actual spill numbers.
Number of spills
| 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Galmpton Hope Cove sewage treatment works settled storm overflow, Salcombe | 16 | 7 | 17 | 11 |
| Inner Hope Cove pumping station overflow, Hope Cove | 6 | 2 | 5 | 4 |
| Outer Hope Cove pumping station overflow, Hope Cove | 56 | 38 | 75 | 80 |
The beach profiles were created in line with information provided by our partners, Environment Agency, RNLI, Keep Britain Tidy, MCS - Beach Guide and British Beaches.