Swimming campaigners make a splash in Brussels city centre

A group campaigning for open-air swimming facilities in Brussels turned the basin at Sainte-Catherine into a public pool on Sunday morning. After cleaning the water and surrounding area, around 30 people gathered to jump in.

Swimming campaigners make a splash in Brussels city centrehttps://t.co/SKHwPomxdW pic.twitter.com/DcaSbONN3w

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The cold plunge was organised by Pool is Cool, the non-profit behind the Flow swimming pool in Anderlecht, which closed in 2025. Opened in 2021, the pool – the only one of its kind in the capital – offered swimming lessons, yoga classes, film screenings and aqua aerobics, and, more recently, a cold water swim every Sunday throughout the winter. 

Since Flow’s closure, the community of cold swimmers have been hosted sporadically in private pools across the capital from Uccle to Neder-Over-Heembeek. Sunday’s event was a call to the authorities to provide open-air swimming facilities in the city available to all.

“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,” says Paul Steinbrück, coordinator of Pool Is Cool. “The Sainte-Catherine basin is simply the best place in town to do this.”

The basin was filled with fresh water a week ago, and a laboratory test of the water quality last summer showed excellent results for the parameters tested. 

“We believe that outdoor swimming places are simply relevant for the living quality of a city,” says Steinbrück. “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, reading a book, having good chats and maybe meet new people. These places are simply necessary, and they’re totally lacking in Brussels.”