For the first time in over a century, Parisians are swimming in their own river again following a cleanup effort that ran over $1.5 billion.
PARIS EST MAGIQUE ! 🫶🏻🇫🇷#ParisJeTaime #Seine pic.twitter.com/9AvaKnYeoS
— Clément Beaune (@CBeaune) July 12, 2025
Currently open to 1,000 bathers daily in three different cordoned swimming locations for free, Parisians are flocking to enjoy their river the way their great-grandparents once did.
Excitement that pollution in the Seine river would be low enough to allow for healthy swimming grew and grew in the years and months leading up to the Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024, when it was supposed to be used for the triathlon event.
Both Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and French President Emanual Macron promised to take a dip in the Seine in July before the Games’ opening, and while the former did, the latter was officially unable to because of campaign commitments, though critics accused him of fearing that pollution remained.
In 2023, GNN reported on the progress made by the $2.3 billion project that started shortly after Paris was awarded the Games. By 2018 the city had already passed a law which mandated the Seine’s many houseboats had to moor by sewage access. They had been dumping right into the river before.
More than half-a-billion euros was earmarked for huge storage basins and other public works that will reduce the need to let bacteria-laden water spill out into the Seine when it rains, while other government money is going to improve sewage treatment plants along the banks and at the tributary of the Marne.
One storage facility located near Paris’ Austerlitz train station can hold 20 Olympic swimming pools of dirty water from being spat raw into the river.
Following the Games, some of the athletes who swam in the Seine got sick, and the river as well as the government became easy targets for finger pointing.
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In February of this year, the Guardian reported that water samples contained the DNA of rare mussels sensitive to pollution and thought to be on the point of extinction in France, indicating that efforts were paying off, if a little late.
The thick shelled river mussel, the black river mussel, and the depressed river mussel are all considered near-extinct, and the researchers sampling the Seine for DNA hadn’t even been looking for them; they were expecting fish, which they also found at 10-times the density and diversity of a study done in 1960.
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Then, in early July as a heat-wave gripped Europe, the Seine was declared open for swimming. A much needed way to cool off that happens to be carbon-neutral, it’s believed the Seine swimming spots will become chief attractions inside the city and beyond, where another 10 such spots, cordoned off to protect swimmers from boat traffic, are planned to open.
Lifeguards, changing facilities, and showers are all present at the bathing spots, and now, despite whatever else he has going on, Macron can have no excuse from taking that dip.
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