Paris Has a New Plan to Make the Seine Swimmable
The French capital has been trying to clean up the river for decades. With the 2024 Summer Olympics looming, a new plan could curb sewage pollution for good.
Parisians enjoy warm weather along the Seine river in March.
Photographer: Rafael Yaghobzadeh/Getty Images EuropeA new project launched in Paris might help the city finally achieve a long-held but elusive goal: making the River Seine clean enough to swim in.
Paris may have one of the most beautiful urban rivers in the world, but attempts to render the Seine safe to enough to plunge into have been falling short since as far back as 1988, when then-Mayor Jacques Chirac made a never-fulfilled promise to swim in it within five years. More recently, in 2017, the city opened swimming facilities along the more sheltered Canal Saint Martin, which runs through eastern Paris before opening onto the Seine. But even this smaller, more manageable waterway has had to be closed at times when bacteria levels in the water rose too high.