Can you swim in Venice canals?
No, swimming in Venice canals is not permitted and it’s not recommended. You still might think it could be a good idea when you stand there, at the border of the cool but somewhat brownish canal. To just throw yourself from the marble pier into the fresh water. When the tropical Venice’s summer heat covers you like a thick, sweaty blanket, it might be tempting. Or why not dive in and swim over the canal when you missed the last Vaporetto?
No, swimming in Venice is not a good idea, and there are three reasons why. So. let’s dive into why it’s advisable, no pun intended:
- The water is contaminated from the city itself. It’s the sewer.
- The water is polluted, full of heavy metals and all kinds of chemicals, from industrial activity and shipping.
- It’s prohibited.
Any one of the three reasons above is a valid motive to not venture any part of your body into the canal water, not even your hands or feet. All of them together should keep you fairly convinced that I’m right about this. The crazy videos showing slightly oozed youngsters laughing and playing between the Gondolas, or tourists getting arrested for breaking the law, are all quite disgusting from a Venetian perspective. But, let’s look at the reasons one by one.
Swimming in Venice canals means you’re swimming in the sewer.
The canals in Venice are not only the transport system and a beautiful mirror in which the yellow moon reflects himself. It’s also the sewer. Venice has from an ancient time a system where the various pipes of wastewater have the canal as the final destination.
Modern times’ normal demands for a cleaner environment and the technical inventions put in to satisfy them don’t work here. The pipes and tubes underneath the houses necessary to collect wastewater have never been built in Venice. The reason is that it can’t be done. You would have to raise the whole city half a meter. So even if houses nowadays have biological pits, the final destination is the canal. From there the tide transports the waste to the sea and fills up with clean water twice a day.
Bigger structures, hotels, the city’s official buildings, restaurants, and others have more sophisticated solutions. They filter the wastewater before they send it into the canal. This helps a lot and what comes out, in the end, is supposed to be as clean as drinking water. But even if this is true it’s still filtered liquid from the toilets and the sinks. And I, for one, would think twice before diving into it.
The Canals in Venice are polluted.
After the First World War, a new harbor for Venice was constructed. Looking at it from a distance of a hundred years, it’s easy to see why that was a very stupid idea, putting the harbor inside the lagoon. The same Venice Lagoon that once was the sole reason for Venice’s existence. The marshland that nobody could penetrate, neither from land nor from the sea. Now you built one of the biggest ports in the whole Adriatic Sea right there. And in fact, it has caused a lot of problems. The lagoon is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it’s obvious that running oil tankers right through it isn’t a good idea. From a swimming point of view, the transit of big vessels means pollution.
Then there is the heavy chemical industry in the industrial area in Porto Marghera. There’s waste from the two rivers running out into the lagoon on the western side. There are cargo ships coming in south of Venice through the Strait of Malamocco, and last but not least there are some 600 cruise ships a year anchoring in Venice. All this sums up to lagoon water that is not as healthy as we would like it to be. The levels of heavy metals and other toxic substances are high, even though it varies a lot depending on the tide and the traffic on the waterways.
Swimming in Venice is prohibited.
The third reason is that it’s simply not allowed. And the fine is 350 euros. To that comes the fact that swimming in the Venice canals is not easy to conceal. After all, there are tourists everywhere, especially in summer, and the police are very alert on this particular issue. It creates headlines, and to some extent, it gives the city a bad reputation.
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But… It wasn’t always like that. In the past people actually swam in the canals. As far ahead as in the sixties children jumped in the water from the bridges in summer, when the air is as hot as in the desert. The famous fistfights that were held until the 18th century consisted of throwing people in the canal.
Lord Byron liked the idea of swimming in Venice’s canals. He used to swim naked in the Grand Canal to keep fit. Once he swam from Lido to Canal Grande together with Mengaldo and Alexander Scott. I very much would have liked to say that in those days the water was cleaner, but it probably wasn’t. The heavy pollution from ship traffic wasn’t around yet, but the wastewater from the houses inside the city was probably much worse… On the other hand, typhus and smallpox were still around then.
Swimming in Venice – How to do it.
Even if swimming in Venice is today out of the question, further out it’s still possible. On hot summer days, you can still see children and teenagers fooling around in the water on the Giudecca side of Canale della Giudecca. This canal continues in a straight line to the coast and into the Adriatic Sea. The Venetians consider Canale della Giudecca as sea… Sea water. And as such, the water is cleaner.
And on the outside of Le Vignole, or at Sant Erasmo, both further out but still inside the lagoon, you will have no problem getting wet. On hot summer days, the beaches and shallow waters are crowded.
But the water inside Venice has just about nothing to do with the seawater you find there. So, when we see tourists sitting along the Grand Canal with their feet in the water, or when someone puts his or her hand in the small canal and takes a handful of water to chill the forehead, we go:
– Blaaeeh! They definitely do not know what that is. Because if they did they wouldn’t be touching it, not even with gloves.
But, now you know. So, there’s no excuse anymore.