River swimming, the Swiss habit that cannot be repeated abroad

In Switzerland people jump into the Aare or the Rhine in summer without thinking about it, and it seems normal. The accounts gathered from Swiss citizens living abroad say it is nothing of the sort.

The first obstacle is water quality. Someone living in Mexico reports that sewage goes straight into the rivers. From a reader in Thailand comes an equally blunt description: the water is very dirty. In the United Kingdom the problem concerns untreated water discharged into watercourses, which makes bathing inadvisable; from there too comes an explicit longing for the Aare and Lake Thun.

The second obstacle is wildlife. In Kenya, writes someone who lives there, many rivers have dried up and others are occupied by crocodiles. From Florida comes a warning phrased as a rule: in any body of water you must always assume there is an alligator. From South Africa come reports of encounters with crocodiles and hippos.

Elsewhere the question simply does not arise. On Bonaire, in the Caribbean, there are no streams or rivers: people swim in the sea. In the Netherlands, by contrast, bathing in the canals remains widespread despite formal bans.

What makes a habit possible

The thread running through the replies is nostalgia, and more than one person expresses it plainly. One, living in the Mojave Desert, wrote that the next day they would be leaving Switzerland again and would miss swimming badly.

The comparison also yields a less sentimental point, however. That a river running through a city is fit for swimming is not a natural condition: it is the result of decades of water treatment, of rules on discharges and of public investment in plants nobody sees. Swiss waters were not always clean, and their present state depends on a system that has to be maintained.

The comparison with the United Kingdom, where the question of untreated discharges is at the centre of public debate, shows how quickly that condition can be lost. It is the practical other side of a habit Switzerland takes for granted.