Makar Artemev
Fancy a dip in the Spree? If you don’t count all the rusty bikes and unexploded bombs from World War II buried in the riverbed, it’s actually not that dirty – by WHO guidelines, swimming in it is usually okay until a bigger downpour comes by, flushing the city’s dirt and feces into the water. And don’t worry about the plastic floating around – tourists are coming to clean that up!
Although swimming in the river was banned in 1925 due to industrial pollution causing hygiene concerns, nowadays the water is clean enough for bathing a solid 80% of the time between May and October according to measurements by Flussbad Berlin.
As such, the organisation – famous for staging swimming protests in the Spree last year – is not relenting in its campaign to open up the river to the public. With five months to go before the local elections, they are planning to jump into the water regularly on the 20th of every month, starting May 20 (the 101st anniversary of the swimming ban taking effect), to exert enough pressure on politicians to scrap the outdated law.
The activists are quite serious about their proposal: alongside a three-colour flag system to indicate whether the water is clean enough for swimming on a given day, they’ve also developed an app so it’s possible to check that information online before showing up in Speedos at the riverbank. And they’re not limiting their campaign to the Spree Canal, either – they aim to extend the permitted swimming zone further along Berlin’s waterways in the future, once the “pilot project” at the canal proves successful – and are thus aptly renaming themselves to “River Swimming Berlin”.