I slipped into the water and quickly swam away before the man who swam like a porpoise could get close, caressing his chest. Below me, the aluminum bottom of the pool plays with the sunlight, teasing it back through the bubbles. I took one last right breath before doing a flip turn, and lo and behold: the Eiffel Tower was rising so close I could count its metal crosses. Pool windows offer an unobstructed, third-floor view.
Swimming in Paris is a complete cultural experience. Many public pools don’t just look like historical monuments, they are historical monuments. Backstroking under the buttresses that reach the vaulted ceiling of the 99-year-old Butte-aux-Cailles pool is like backstroking in a cathedral.
But after a year of swimming in Paris, it’s the smaller cultural insights I’ve gained that matter most: the intimate view into the French psyche and lifestyle that’s practically on display in the swimming lanes, locker rooms and showers, which is – quite alarming — mostly coed.
I have been a swimmer since I was a child. I competed on my team in high school and for one year in college. I put on a wet suit and swam in a Canadian lake throughout the coronavirus pandemic when pools were closed, to keep my sanity. It’s my form of exercise and stress reliever.
So when I moved to Paris in August, I quickly came up with a list of must-visit public pools across the city, many of which date back to the 1930s, at the height of the Art Deco architectural craze. They are very beautiful.
Take a ride at the Piscine des Amiraux, built in the 1930s on the working-class northern edge of the city. It was a long, thin pool, with walls covered in white subway tiles. Look up, and you see a skylight roof, above two rings of balconies lined with the green doors of individual changing rooms. You hang your gear on anchor-shaped hooks, and when you’re done swimming, a boy will come to the cabin and open the door for you.
Everything feels like swimming back in time.
But even more modern pools offer qualities of beauty that seem luxurious to a North American eye that is elevated to functionality.
Most have large windows, which allow natural light to flow through. Many open to lush gardens. I was so drawn to two trees shedding lush pink blossoms on one side of the Jean Taris pool that I didn’t notice the dome of the Panthéon rising behind them until the lifeguard pointed it out, helping me identify the trees. (Crepe myrtle by the way.)
I quickly thought of some of the rules and unspoken systems: no shoes in the changing room, bathing caps required and no board shorts, just a snug fit. Coed showers are harder to get used to, even if the showerers are wearing their suits.
Paris introduced “mixité” to showers in 2006 to cut costs and to reflect the city’s liberal attitude toward gender, explained Franck Guilluy, a former world champion pentathlete who oversees the city’s 50 pools. The transformation, however, solved fewer problems than it created — including exhibitionism — and the city is ending the experiment, installing separate showers as it renovates the pools.
However, despite the horror it gave me – especially when the men soaped up and vigorously scrubbed the bottoms of their suits and then rinsed by unzipping their shorts in the water while they stood next to me – wanted some swimmers.
Writer Colombe Schneck, together with her artist sister Marine Schneck, visited all 50 pools and published a guide, “Paris à la Nage.” Colombe Schneck considers public pools to be one of the few places in the city where there is real social mixing, not dressed up by sex, gender and class.
Coed showers reinforce that communal ideal, he said.
“We’re just swimming bodies — male and female. We do not care. We should all come together,” said Ms. Schneck me for a post-swim drink and snack at a nearby cafe, in keeping with the sisters’ mantra: “We don’t swim to lose weight.” (Each pool in their guide includes a local restaurant or cafe recommendation.)
He had no answer as to why the most perfectly appointed Parisians, so consumed by fashion rules and strict etiquette on the city’s streets, had no problem showing their informality in the showers.
“We are all a mixture of contradictions,” he said.
That’s just one of the many cultural enigmas I’ve discovered in Parisian pools. For a country known for bureaucracy and regulations, there is surprisingly little order on the roads.
On a typical morning at my local pool, most lanes are filled with a mix of swimmers: serious athletes tapping their watches between sets; the competent-but-slow breaststrokers who prove difficult to pass; and what I call sensualists: People who come to interact with water and enter their own dream world. You can see them doing a few strokes and then drifting down to the bottom of the pool.
Technically, the lanes should be separated into fast, medium and slow. But I saw that in only one pool.
The French take their devotion to freedom on the water with them. You may have passed a swimmer three times, but he won’t wait at the wall to let you in again. Instead, he will push in front of you.
“I hardly ever go to public pools — it’s impossible to swim,” sympathizes Arthur Germain, a famous young French swimmer who in 2021 swim the entire length of the Seine in 49 days.
The French bureaucracy nearly killed his project — despite being the daughter of Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo. Mr. Germain needs approval from 14 government authorities and 330 mayors. He sees the pandemonium in the swim lanes as a natural response to living with all those rules.
“When people have freedom in France, it’s very chaotic,” Mr. Germain said. “People don’t meditate. They don’t think about the swimmers around them.”
As for the sensualists, French sports historian Thierry Terret helped me understand them.
The first swimming pools in Paris were literally built floating over the Seine and resembled a mix between a single-sex social club and a Turkish bath. People go that day to visit the barber, take a dip in the water, eat a rich meal soaked in wine and then sleep for two hours.
When the first year-round pools were built in the ground in the late 19th century, they were made to resemble rivers – long and thin, with varying depths and even rocks and waterfalls.
“The first real pool was built for all other reasons than sport,” Mr. Terret said.
Only later, especially during the Cold War when winning Olympic medals offered ideological superiority, did competition become part of swimming culture.
The mixed culture displayed in today’s pools is a legacy of this.
At first, I found swimming in it frustrating: too much dodging and motorboat-style kicking to pass.
But over time, I adapted. Instead of fighting them, I learn from the sensualists.
I slowed down to take in the architectural and botanical beauty around me. Instead of laughing at the water, I felt its silky threads on my fingers. I worked to notice the light bending in the water. It now feels less like a harried game of Frogger and more like swimming in an Impressionist painting.
There are some less beautiful pools in the city, Mr. Guilluy said — underground, no gardens, no Art Deco features. They tend to be less busy.
I might try one of them to get a real workout, I guess.
But given the choice between beauty and exercise, I’ll take beauty. That way, I become a Parisian.
