Paris floats pool idea on the River Seine

PARIS - Parisians, and tourists, will be able to swim in the Seine - or at least on the Seine - from tomorrow for the first time in 13 years.

City mayor Bertrand Delanoe was to open a new, floating swimming pool moored on the river in eastern Paris.

The pool, open year round, with a retractable roof, replaces a much-loved Paris institution - the Piscine Deligny - which sank in the river in unexplained circumstances in 1993.

To celebrate the opening of the new pool, the summertime conversion of the Seine quays into a mock beach - Paris Plage - will this year extend to both sides of the river.

The Piscine Deligny was a masterpiece of brass and elaborately carved wood, used as an Olympic swimming pool in the Paris games of 1924.

Its loss in July 1993 was described at the time as an "urban Titanic" disaster - though no one was killed or injured.

The new pool is to be called the Piscine Josephine Baker, after the American dancer, actress, singer, civil rights activist and French resistance heroine, who died in Paris in 1975.

The pool is housed in a steel, wood and glass barge, which was built in Rouen and towed up the river. The main pool is 25m long and 10m wide. There will also be a children's pool, a sauna, a jacuzzi, a solarium and a bar.

It will be regularly filled and re-filled from the Seine. The water will be treated twice: before use, to protect swimmers; and afterwards to protect the now-flourishing population of Seine fish from an overdose of sun-tan lotion and perfume.

The Piscine Josephine Baker, previously known unromantically as the Piscine Seine Est, will be moored on the left bank of the river close to the new national library, the Bibliotheque Francois Mitterrand.

There used to be half a dozen floating pools on the Seine, both municipal and private. Paris is now notoriously short of swimming pools of all kinds. Mayor Delanoe promised that, if the new pool was successful, the city would consider building floating facilities on other parts of the river.

The fifth version of Paris Plage begins on 20 July and lasts until 20 August. As in previous years, the urban motorway along the lower quays on the right bank of the Seine - the Voie Georges Pompidou - will be closed for a three kilometre stretch in the centre of the city. There will be bars, deck-chairs and sand-pits.

There will also be a 700m, second beach around the new swimming pool on the left bank of the river in front of the new national library building opened in 1996.

- INDEPENDENT