The importance of local communities relying on fisheries is constantly emphasised in the European Union's Common Fishery Policy. Previous studies have analysed fishery employment for the entire EU based on statistical figures aggregated by administrative units at the regional or provincial level. This paper adopts a geographical approach to identify EU coastal communities relying on fisheries using accessibility analysis, principles at the basis of gravity models and disaggregated population and employment statistics. The dependency on fisheries is calculated comparing estimated employment from fisheries at each port with general employment in the areas of accessibility surrounding the port. By considering spatially disaggregated statistics the importance of fishing activities for specific local communities emerges more clearly in respect of previous studies. The map of fisheries dependent coastal communities identifies in 2010, 388 communities, out of 1697, with dependency ratios above 1%. Around 54% of total fishery employment is estimated in these areas. In terms of policy support, identifying and mapping these local fishing coastal communities is of key importance considering the strong priority assigned by the new European Union's Common Fishery Policy to fishery management at the regional level.