Paris's Latest Luxury: Sparkling Water Fountains

What do you give the city that has everything? Not content to rest on its laurels as a perceived capital of all things classy and cultured, Paris is taking to the streets with one of life’s simpler luxuries: sparkling water.

Since 2010, the city has possessed a small network of fountains dispensing fresh sparkling water scattered across the city. Until this month, there were only eight of these fountains, but Paris City Hall has just embarked on an ambitious-sounding scheme that will ultimately provide at least one fountain of sparkling water in every one of Paris’s 20 Arrondissements. Today, a new sparkling water fountain flanking the Canal Saint Martin (at Square Eugene Varlin) emitted its first gush, the first of nine new ones due to be installed by next December. Within a few years, every corner of Paris could be flowing with free fizz. At the outset, the city’s water authorities presented this as a way of nudging Parisians to hydrate more.