(18 Jun 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Berlin, Germany – 17 June 2025
1. Swimmers walking on sidewalk
2. Swimmers diving into river
3. SOUNDBITE (German) Jan Edler, Fluss Bad Berlin board member:
++PART OVERLAID BY SHOTS 2, 4, 5++
“For 100 years now, people have not been allowed to swim in the inner-city Spree and we no longer think this is justified, because we can show that the water quality is usually good enough to go swimming during the season. It has become much, much better.”
4. Swimmers lining up to jump into the water
5. Sign reading “Swimmable city yes!”
6. Swimmers diving into river
7. Woman swimming
8. Mid of people swimming
9. Wide of people swimming
STORYLINE:
There’s a push by swimmers to get back into the water in Berlin after the German capital banned swimming in the Spree River because it was so polluted that locals were at risk of falling ill.
On Tuesday, around 200 people jumped into the river’s slow-moving, greenish water to show that it’s not only clean enough, but also lots of fun to splash and swim in the city’s historic Mitte neighborhood along the world-famous Museum Island.
A group calling itself Fluss Bad Berlin, or River Pool Berlin, has been lobbying for several years to open up the river for swimmers again.
“For 100 years now, people have not been allowed to swim in the inner-city Spree and we no longer think this is justified, because we can show that the water quality is usually good enough to go swimming during the season," said Jan Edler, who is on the board of Fluss Bad Berlin and helped organize Tuesday’s swim-in.
To circumvent the ban, the group registered their collective swim event as an official protest.
Standing on a little staircase that leads down to the Spree canal, which flows around the southern side of the island, Edler stressed that “we want the people to use the Spree for recreation again.”
He pointed that the river has been cleaned up thoroughly, and that the water quality has improved in the last decade and is constantly being monitored.
Even city officials in the central Mitte district of Berlin say they’d be interested in introducing river swimming again in 2026.
Supporters of lifting the swimming ban also point at Paris, where the Seine River was opened up for swimmers for the Olympic Games last year and will be opened this summer for Parisians.
Swimming there had been banned since 1923.
Only in Berlin, swimming has been continuously prohibited in the Spree since May 1925, when the German capital closed all traditional river pools because the water was deemed too toxic.
Some of those pools weren’t only used for recreational swimming, but were a place for poor people to wash themselves if they didn’t have bathrooms at home.
These days, the water is clean on most days, except when there’s heavy rain, which leads to some water pollution.
Allowing swimmers to dive into the river would also mean loosening the historical monument protection on some parts of the river banks to install easy access ways to the water and places for life guards.
Another problem is the busy boat traffic on the Spree that could endanger swimmers.
However, for the time being, the Fluss Bad Berlin group only wants to open up the 1.8-km-long (1.1 mile) canal where there’s no boat traffic.
AP video by Pietro De Cristofaro
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