It wasn’t that long ago that Paris had a reputation for… let’s say, being un petit peu mucky. Cigarette butt-covered streets, endless dog poop and piles of uncollected bins were classic Parisian stereotypes. And the murky Seine? Well, it was said to be brimming with E.coli. A quick dip could find you bound to the loo – or worse – for days.
But it looks like Paris’ €1.4 billion clean-up act is working. With a year to go to the Paris Olympics, the French capital is in its final lap of a historic clean-up which will soon see swimmers (and fish!) back in the River Seine. Not only are three Olympic and Paralympic events – triathlon, marathon swimming and Para-triathlon – planned to be held in the Seine, but by summer 2025 there will be three open-air swimming areas accessible to the public.
The French capital’s Mayor Anne Hidalgo revealed the areas – Bras Marie, Bras de Grenelle, and Bercy – and said that this was a key legacy ambition of the city hosting the Olympic games for the first time in 100 years. Thanks to the massive river regeneration project started in 2018, the river clean-up efforts have been slowly but surely seeing results as fish start to return and the water becomes less murky.
How did they do it? The solution has been to specifically target sewage pollution by building an enormous, 46,000-cubic-metre water tank under a public garden on the left bank. That’s big enough to hold water from twenty Olympic-sized swimming pools! The tank was designed to store excess rainfall and drastically reduce (but, notably, not completely halt) the amount of sewage overflowing into the river.
Swimming in the Seine has been banned since 1923 because of high levels of pollution, a problem stretching back centuries where bodies from sixteenth-century religious wars used to be thrown into the river. With new walkways and temporary beaches set up in recent years along the river – and now three new dedicated swimming areas – Parisians and visitors are looking forward to the Seine’s exciting new lease of life.
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