We’re celebrating here: on 25 February, our very own Europa website is turning 30. What started as a website small enough to fit on a CD-Rom is now a web domain that includes 800 websites, attracting around 300 million visitors a year. Throughout the last 30 years, the Europa website has remained true to its original mission: to bring the European Union closer to citizens and communicate what the EU does for them.
The European Commission launched the Europa website in 1995, just in time for a G7 conference that took place at the time. During that event, Klaus Hänsch, then President of the European Parliament, said: “Access to information on information must be available to all” – something which still rings true today. In this era of disinformation, people, of course, want reliable information from sources they can trust, and that is what the Europa domain stands for.
The original Europa website was operated by the Commission and published in three languages. With email not yet widely available, the website team used to receive information via fax from different services and retype it manually before publishing on the website. The site’s come a long a way since then. Content has multiplied, other EU institutions have got on board, and technology has continued to advance. Europa now publishes information in 24 languages and certain other non-EU languages, like Ukrainian, Chinese and Arabic.
We have archives that include video footage and photos of Europa, some of which mark big moments in our history. They are stored on the EU’s Audiovisual Service, which along with us, is also celebrating an anniversary of its own. We send them our best wishes!
For more information
From the archives: see the first Europa website
