The beach in Rimini Tourists enjoying the beach at Rimini
Rimini is the biggest beach resort on the entire Adriatic Sea, with more than 16 million night-stays per year, when including all the coastal municipalities in its Province, and more than 7 million night-stays in the single Rimini municipality. It is the Italian Province with the highest number (84,000) of hotel bedrooms, covering respectively 7.7% (for the Province) and 3.5% of the total Italian hotel capacity (number of bedrooms). The Rimini municipality alone with 1,100 hotels and 38,000 hotel bedrooms, corresponding to more than 250 hotel bedrooms for 1,000 residents, has one the highest density of hotels and bedrooms in Europe.

Romagna provinces supplied by Romagna Acque-Societá delle Fonti
Rimini has a long history of tourism development (the first bathing establishment opened in 1843), being one of the first mass-tourist destinations at the beginning of the 20th century and reaching a mature stage already in the 1960s. The massive tourist development resulted in indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources, including water. Recently, the city of Rimini has played a pro-active role in analyzing and proposing sustainable forms of coastal tourism. RomagnaAcque – Società delle Fonti is the regional water supplier and it provides wholesale water to HERA SpA, the main retail water company in the provinces of Ravenna, Forlí-Cesena and Rimini (more than one million permanent residents and millions of tourists). The most important water source is the artificial reservoir of the Ridracoli Dam, which meets about 50% (around 60,000 m3/year) of the region total water requirement. The water for the city of Rimini is supplied partially from the Ridracoli reservoir and partially from local groundwater well fields.

Rimini, as well as the entire Romagna region, experienced water scarcity conditions in 2002, 2007, 2011 and 2017. For this reason, a set of mitigation measures was implemented, including ordnances for the limitation of water consumption.