France: Swimming in the Seine, once a popular pastime
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00:00It was once a haven to cool off on hot days.
00:04Starting in the 17th century, swimming in the Seine River was, for Parisians,
00:08a much-loved pastime.
00:10By 1801, there were cordoned off areas to learn to swim and navigate its currents.
00:16But questions of decency and competition from boat traffic
00:19would slowly make river swimming a rarity in Paris.
00:23Competitions like the 1900 Olympics were still held in it,
00:26and swimming barges along the river were also popular.
00:30And the Seine has become like the sea,
00:32with the Attaoui riverbanks becoming the Attaoui beach.
00:36Even the guidebooks don't yet mention this family vacation spot.
00:40Swimming in the Paris portion was outlawed in 1923 due to the dangers from freight traffic.
00:45But going for a dip was still possible on the city outskirts.
00:50It's mostly wealthy people who would swim, but at the same time, for example,
00:53the mayor of Ivry in the 1930s would open areas to working-class people.
00:58Until the 1960s, occasional wild swimmers would dive in.
01:03But the Seine was becoming dangerously polluted.
01:05And in May 1990, the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, vowed to clean up the waterway.
01:12I can confirm we can make a river clean, and I've said that in three years,
01:16I will swim in the Seine in front of witnesses to show that the Seine has become a clean river.
01:21That promise belly flopped, and Chirac would never take the plunge.
01:26But in 2000, the EU directive to clean up European riverways
01:29would push authorities to anchor such dreams of a cleaner Seine in concrete policies.
01:35The Olympics would allow such hopes to stay afloat and to speed them up.
01:39This led to the 1.4 billion euros in infrastructure investments,
01:43in the hope that the sewage and dirty runoff numbers will plunge over time
01:47and allow what makes Paris Paris, its river, to return to what it once was.