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 Travel & Outdoors | July 2005 
It's Sand In The City As Urban Beaches Sprout All Over Europe
 Canadian Press
| | Parisians and tourists stroll on the Paris-Plage (Paris Beach) installation along the Seine river in Paris. (Photo: Jacques Brinon) |
Vacationers heading to European capitals this summer for museums, culture and fine dining can squeeze in an afternoon at the beach without ever leaving the city.
Stretches of sand are being trucked in to urban riverfronts to create the feeling of a lazy day at the shore, just a seashell's throw from the buildings, shops and busy streets of Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Budapest, Rome and Berlin.
These sand-in-the-city installations are designed primarily for urbanites who don't have money or time for a summer holiday on the Riviera or the Baltic Sea. Several of them have been running for three or four summers now and have been a huge success, drawing thousands of city-dwellers to sit in the sun in their bathing suits and dig their toes in the sand.
Bikini-clad sun worshippers and others have flocked to the Paris Plage, as the trucked-in sand along the Seine River is known in French, since it started in the summer of 2001. The Paris beach, scheduled to open again this year for a month beginning July 21, offers deck chairs, beach bars and concerts.
The 2005 installation will have a Brazilian theme, complete with stretches of sand named Ipanema and Copacabana, lush greenery to conjure up visions of the Amazon, concerts of Brazilian music, a samba school and beach soccer. Refreshment stalls will serve up lime-infused caipirinha cocktails, and children's workshops will make carnival figures.
In Rome, a stretch of beach called Tiber Village opened June 18 on the banks of the Tiber River. The beach, lying in the shadows of St. Peter's Basilica and Castel Sant'Angelo, is built with trucked-in sand and synthetic grass. Visitors have access to showers, swimming pools, deck chairs, bars and restaurants. It's scheduled to remain open until Sept. 17 and was financed by the Battelli di Roma, a company running ferries along the Tiber.
Manmade sandbars are installed in several locations along the Spree River in Berlin. The urban beaches are open already, for their fourth season, and will remain open through September. Palm trees, boardwalks, beach chairs and cocktails add to the illusion of a seaside in the city, and you can even take a dip in the Spree Bridge Bathing Ship, a heated pool located in the hull of a container ship in the river. The beaches typically stay busy until late in the evening.
An urban beach scene in Belgium's capital city called the Brussels Spa will unfold for the third summer in a row from July 22 to Aug. 21. Called Bruxelles les Bains in French and Brussel Bad in Dutch, the sandy stretch, decorated with palm trees, is located along the Quai des Peniches, not far from the city centre. Last year, 700,000 visitors visited the beach to attend concerts, play beach volleyball or other sports, walk through a bamboo forest or visit scores of shops and restaurants.
Since the summer of 2003, Amsterdam has set up a sandy beach on the banks of the Ij lake, just behind Centraal Station. The beach is called Blijburg, which means Happy Village. Although it's been a big hit, a 19-year-old man drowned last summer, raising safety concerns and prompting the city to erect big orange fences between the beach and water.
For the past two years in downtown Budapest, a road along the Danube River has been turned into a beach in August. Dubbed the Budapest Plage, the 1.6-kilometre-long beach with sandboxes and potted palm trees attracted thousands of people even though swimming in the river was not allowed. But the project drew criticism from drivers, who complained it caused traffic jams, and from residents unhappy with the noise.
So far this year, city officials have rejected a request to reopen the beach in the same place, on the Pest side of the Danube, but organizers are appealing the decision. In the meantime, a beach is planned for the other side of the river from July 1 to July 31. |
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