Paris Wants to Make the Seine Swimmable by 2024

By 2024, the River Seine in Paris will be clean enough to swim in. That’s the grand ambition declared by Paris’s City Hall this week. Parts of the Canal Saint Martin, which flows through eastern Paris into the Seine itself, could even be fit to bathe in as early as 2017 should the proposed cleanup go according to plan.

Announced in the run-up to Paris’s bid for the 2024 Olympics, the city has even suggested staging such events as the swimming triathlon in the city’s river. The plan was unveiled in the French media over the weekend with a clutch of other Olympic projects, including a riverside tramway (extending an already existing plan), cycle tracks out to suburban Olympic venues, and a broad walkers’ path ringing the city just beyond the Boulevard Périphérique beltway. It’s the ambition of the Seine cleanup that’s nonetheless the most striking. If official optimism is to be believed, Paris could soon see a sparkling, clear-watered river snaking through its heart, as unsullied and inviting as a country stream.