An Olympic swimming pool holds about 2.5 million litres of water, i.e. 2,500 cubic metres. That is the figure at the minimum depth the rules require (2 metres); competition pools, usually built 3 metres deep, hold up to about 3.75 million litres (3,750 m³). The drawing above splits those 2.5 million litres into roughly 83 tanker trucks: use the "Show" selector to see it in bathtubs, glasses or whatever you like.
The dimensions are set by the facilities rules of World Aquatics (formerly FINA), the world governing body of swimming:
| Dimension | Official size |
|---|---|
| Length | 50 metres |
| Width | 25 metres |
| Lanes | 10 lanes of 2.5 metres |
| Minimum depth | 2 metres (3 m in competition) |
| Water surface | 1,250 m² (0.125 hectares) |
At 50 × 25 metres and 2 metres deep you get 2,500 m³, which is those 2.5 million litres. In US gallons, about 660,430 gallons.
Click any figure to see it drawn to scale above:
In Spain a cubic metre of water costs €2.02 on average (INE figure, supply plus sanitation). Filling the 2,500 m³ of an Olympic pool would cost, for the water alone, around €5,050; for a 3-metre competition pool (3,750 m³), about €7,575. It is only an estimate: the price varies a lot from town to town and excludes treatment and the fixed part of the bill.
Since a cubic metre is 1,000 litres, to work out what a litre of tap water costs you just divide the price of a cubic metre by 1,000. At €2.02/m³, a litre of tap water costs about €0.002: barely 0.2 cents. Put that way, it is clear why bottled water — let alone water at a bar — is hundreds or thousands of times more expensive than turning on the tap:
| A litre of water… | Price per litre |
|---|---|
| From the tap | ~€0.002 (0.2 cents) |
| Bottled, at the supermarket | €0.50 (about 248 litres of tap water) |
| At a bar | €2.50 (about 1,238 litres of tap water) |
Put another way: for what a €2.50 bottle of water costs at a bar you would get 1,238 litres straight from the tap at home.
Want to picture other amounts of water? Try the liters tool, see how much 100,000 litres is or how big a cubic hectometre is. And if you are after areas or distances, there is the Hectareometer and the distances tool.