Brussels Campaigners Take Cold Plunge to Demand Open-Air Swimming Spaces

Forty cold-water swimmers dropped into Brussels' stone-lined Sainte-Catherine basin on a Sunday morning last week, the water still sharp from winter as they made their point: the Belgian capital, which holds the title of Europe's administrative centre, has not a single permanent outdoor swimming facility to its name.

The March 29 action was organized by Pool Is Cool, the non-profit behind years of campaigning for open-air aquatic infrastructure in Brussels. The participants, many of them members of Brrrussels, the community cold-water group that grew out of Pool Is Cool's following, had cleaned the basin themselves ahead of the plunge. The site had been refilled with fresh water the week prior, and water-quality testing had already returned acceptable parameters for the region, an implicit rebuttal to any official who might cite safety concerns as grounds for inaction.

Pool Is Cool coordinator Paul Steinbrück framed the event directly: "This is an action to denounce the total lack of open swimming places in Brussels. We've jumped into private pools, but we thought, now it's time to make some more noise."

That private-pool circuit has been the group's workaround since Flow, the open-air pool Pool Is Cool operated in Anderlecht from 2021 until its closure in 2025, shut down due to a lack of funding. Flow had been conceived explicitly as a prototype, proof that demand for outdoor swimming in Brussels existed and could be met. Its closure left the community with no fixed public venue, scattering Brrrussels swimmers across willing residents' backyards and garden ponds each winter.

The Sainte-Catherine stunt flips the script on that improvised arrangement, using the basin itself as a proof-of-use argument aimed at policymakers. By cleaning the space, confirming the water quality, and swimming without incident, campaigners did the preparatory work the city hasn't. Formalizing outdoor swimming in Brussels would require year-round safety protocols, water-quality monitoring, and clear liability frameworks, none of which currently govern urban open-water sites in the capital.

Steinbrück described stakes that go well beyond lap swimming. "They're places not only for sports, for health, for swimming, but also for social encounters: you spend the day in nature, under the blue sky, in the sun, with your family, with friends... they're simply necessary, and they're totally lacking in Brussels."

Pool Is Cool has been petitioning for permanent open-air swimming in Brussels since at least 2014. The Sainte-Catherine action is the campaign's most visible escalation yet, and it hands other European cities with contested water-access politics a concrete template: clean the space, test the water, get forty people in, and make the footage the city's problem to explain away.