For years, the French capital has been promising to open up its urban waterways for safe, clean public swimming. This month, it’s done exactly that.
On Monday, Paris’s Mayor Anne Hidalgo opened-up new open-air swimming enclosure in the Bassin de la Villette, a basin constructed for barges that links the Canal de l’Ourcq with the Canal Saint-Martin in the city’s inner northeast. In temperatures of over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, Parisians lined up to splash about the three new pools fed directly from the canal’s waters, separated from the watercourse’s general flow only by filter meshes to keep leaves and other objects out.
