{"id":8237,"date":"2026-04-28T16:03:22","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T16:03:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/8237\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T16:03:22","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T16:03:22","slug":"spree-swimming-demonstrations-are-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/8237\/","title":{"rendered":"Spree swimming demonstrations are back"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\"\"Makar Artemev<\/p>\n

Fancy a dip in the Spree? If you don\u2019t count all the rusty bikes and unexploded bombs from World War II buried in the riverbed, it\u2019s actually not that dirty \u2013 by WHO guidelines, swimming in it is usually okay until a bigger downpour comes by, flushing the city\u2019s dirt and feces into the water. And don\u2019t worry about the plastic<\/a> floating around \u2013 tourists are coming to clean that up<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As such, the organisation \u2013 famous for staging swimming protests in the Spree last year<\/a> \u2013 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May 20 (the 101st anniversary of the swimming ban taking effect), to exert enough pressure on politicians to scrap the outdated law.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ve also developed an app so it\u2019s possible to check that information online before showing up in Speedos at the riverbank. And they\u2019re not limiting their campaign to the Spree Canal, either \u2013 they aim to extend the permitted swimming zone further along Berlin\u2019s waterways in the future, once the \u201cpilot project\u201d at the canal proves successful \u2013 and are thus aptly renaming themselves to \u201cRiver Swimming Berlin\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Makar Artemev Fancy a dip in the Spree? If you don\u2019t count all the rusty bikes and unexploded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8238,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18,103,1978,8125,8126],"class_list":{"0":"post-8237","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-berlin","8":"tag-berlin","9":"tag-demonstration","10":"tag-law","11":"tag-spree","12":"tag-swimming"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}