Let’s clear up a massive misconception right away: swimming is not just a sport or a summer holiday pastime, but a primary survival skill. Furthermore, just like healthcare or education, it has become a ruthless indicator of social class.
While a global network of activists and administrations is beginning to fight to reopen urban waters and reclaim so-called "blue spaces", there is an underlying hypocrisy we must address before we can tear down the bans: in this century, we have turned swimming instruction into a luxury for those who can afford it.
The idea that floating is a universal skill is a lie brutally refuted by statistics. According to official data from the World Health Organization (WHO), drowning is globally the fourth leading cause of death for children aged 1 to 4 and the third for those aged 5 to 14. Every year, water kills 300,000 people worldwide, and nearly a quarter are children under five. And those dying are not naive tourists in search of adventure.
The WHO clearly states where these deaths occur: 92% of the planet's drownings happen in low- and middle-income countries, at a rate more than three times higher than in wealthy nations. More than half of all deaths are concentrated in the Western Pacific and South-East Asia.
The silent geography of those who drown
Let’s take Italy. We are used to thinking of drownings as tragedies caused by rough seas, but the data tells a violently classist story. The annual report of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità observatory records 604 fatal drownings in the 2024-2025 biennium, almost evenly split: 281 at sea and 277 in inland waters (rivers, lakes, canals). And the region with the highest count does not even have a single meter of coastline: it is Lombardy, with 90 cases.
A disproportionate percentage of immigrants die in those fresh waters: in Lombardy, foreigners account for about half of the victims. It is not a coincidence; it is pure, ruthless economics. Swimming lessons cost money, trips to the seaside require trains, and beach clubs have unaffordable prices. The river (such as the Adda, the Ticino, or the Brembo) and the local lake, however, are free. Kids dive in to escape the summer heat, but inland fresh water is treacherous. The impact with 10-15 degree currents causes violent cold shock, panic, and subsequent breath-holding. Those who die in these waters do not do so because of "fate," but because society never provided them with the tools to manage them.
In the Netherlands, a nation built on water, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) has certified that the risk of drowning for children born outside Europe is over 14 times higher than for their Dutch peers. And the Netherlands is certainly not inattentive to the subject: in 2024, nearly four out of ten Dutch children between 6 and 12 years old had all three school swimming diplomas (A, B, and C). It is a national record. But the research institute that presented it used an emblematic headline: swimming ability among vulnerable children lags behind.
The pools that closed due to racism
If social class is the deciding factor in Europe, in the United States the gap has a frightening racial origin. Across the ocean, drowning kills about 4,000 people a year. And while for the WHO this is the fourth leading cause of child death globally, in the USA it is the number one cause of death for children between 1 and 4 years old.
The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US federal agency for public health) counts 39.5 million American adults who cannot swim. The gap has an unmistakable color: 36.8% of Black adults report not knowing how to swim, compared to just 6.9% of white adults. Mortality rates confirm the carnage: the highest peaks are recorded among Native Americans (2.6-3.1 deaths per 100,000), followed by Black people (1.5-1.9), with white people at the bottom (1.2-1.4).
There is a detail that makes things worse: African American adults objectively spend much less time in the water (in the last six months, 67% have not been in a pool even once). Since those mortality rates are calculated based on the entire population and not on actual time spent in the water, the official numbers grossly underestimate the true severity of the disparity.
But how did we get here? American public pools were strictly segregated. When racial integration was imposed by federal law, many municipalities simply chose to close or fill in municipal pools with concrete rather than mix ethnicities, as confirmed not only by historians but by the CDC's own official reports. In place of public pools, private country clubs grew exponentially, inaccessible to minorities, effectively outsourcing the right to learn to swim only to wealthy white people. A scar that has never healed: after the recent pandemic, drowning rates rose again, surgically striking those who were already dying the most (+28.3% among African Americans in 2021).
Where half the world drowns
In China, drowning is the leading cause of death for children between 1 and 14 years old. And the gap that exists between natives and foreigners in Italy runs clearly between the countryside and the city in China: for those under twenty, in 2021, the mortality rate was 3.84 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in rural areas, compared to 2.01 in urban ones. Almost double.
Japan, on the other hand, faced this reality in 1955 in a horrific way. On May 11, the ferry Shiun Maru sank: 168 deaths, including 100 students. Just two months later, on July 28, in Nakagawara, an anomalous current during a school lesson at sea dragged dozens of children out to sea: 36 girls drowned. The Japanese response to those traumas was radical: swimming became a mandatory school curriculum, and by the 1990s, more than 80% of the country's elementary schools had a functioning pool inside the building.
Yet, today, Japan is also guiltily backtracking. Pools are aging and maintenance is expensive: middle schools with a functioning pool have dropped from 73% in 2018 to 65% in 2021. The result is summarized by Professor Matsui Atsunori of Naruto University: "today there is a clear divide between children who attend swimming lessons and those who do not."
The steel fisherman and the theft of blue spaces
Those at the top of the food chain know very well that swimming saves lives. Since 1940, the elite MIT university in Boston has not granted a degree to any student who does not first pass a strict mandatory swimming test.
In Iceland, this survival dogma is not a requirement for geniuses and the rich, but the infrastructure of an entire nation. Since 1943, swimming instruction has been mandatory by law. And it produces documented miracles. In March 1984, twenty-two-year-old Guðlaugur Friðþórsson survived the sinking of his fishing boat in the Atlantic Ocean. He swam in 5 °C water, in total darkness, for six grueling hours toward a lighthouse on the volcanic coast.
When researchers led by W. R. Keatinge published their study in the British Medical Journal to understand how he had escaped lethal hypothermia, they discovered the incredible: his subcutaneous fat layer was dense and up to 14 millimeters thick, two or three times that of an average human being. It functioned, biologically, in a manner similar to blubber, the insulating adipose tissue typical of seals, protecting internal organs from heat loss. But a biological anomaly alone does not allow one to face six hours of ocean waves without drinking, losing orientation, or giving in to fear. Without the technical endurance and perfect management of panic learned by heart at school since kindergarten, Guðlaugur would never have survived that hell.
But then how did we reach the point where floating has become a luxury? Over the last fifty years, there has been an inexorable process of closing urban blue spaces. Rivers and stretches of metropolitan sea (from the Palermo coastline to the canals of Northern Europe) have been systematically closed to public bathing.
The official cause? Sewage pollution and health risks. A tangle of hypocrisy and management incompetence that we analyze in depth in our dossier on coliform bacteria and urban water. In reality, behind the alibi of "dirty" water, there was a precise political will: preference was given to the construction industry and private operators, abdicating the protection of available natural resources to push citizens into artificial pools.
This has distanced entire generations from open water, outsourcing the right to swim to closed, paid facilities, whose costs decide who lives and who dies.
We have calculated the global Real Impact: the percentage of the average daily wage that a citizen must sacrifice to have a single swim in a municipal or subsidized pool. While state subsidies keep swimming democratic in Northern Europe, elsewhere it has become a ruthless privilege. In Milan or Rome — where today it is almost impossible to find a pool for less than 10 euros — a single dip ends up "burning" nearly 14% of a day's work.
| Country / City | Absolute cost (€ / $) | Real impact (% of daily income) |
|---|---|---|
| China (Beijing) | 8.00 € (8.80 $) | 26.5 % |
| Russia (Moscow) | 6.50 € (7.15 $) | 24.5 % |
| Brazil (São Paulo) | 3.00 € (3.30 $) | 16.5 % |
| Italy (Milan/Rome) | 10.00 € (11.00 $) | 13.5 % |
| South Africa (Cape Town) | 1.80 € (2.00 $) | 13.5 % |
| Poland (Warsaw) | 5.50 € (6.05 $) | 13.0 % |
| Portugal (Lisbon) | 4.50 € (4.95 $) | 11.5 % |
| Norway (Oslo) | 14.00 € (15.40 $) | 11.0 % |
| Spain (Barcelona) | 6.50 € (7.15 $) | 10.5 % |
| United Kingdom (London) | 9.10 € (10.00 $) | 9.0 % |
| Iceland (Reykjavík) | 8.60 € (9.45 $) | 8.0 % |
| Germany (Berlin) | 6.00 € (6.60 $) | 6.0 % |
| South Korea (Seoul) | 4.00 € (4.40 $) | 4.5 % |
| Japan (Tokyo) | 3.20 € (3.50 $) | 4.0 % |
| France (Paris) | 3.50 € (3.85 $) | 4.0 % |
| USA (public pools) | 5.50 € (6.05 $) | 3.5 % |
(Methodological note: the real impact is an estimate calculated by comparing the ticket price to the net daily wage in each metropolis, estimated on 22 working days per month. Local net income data sources: processing of Numbeo, OECD, and ILOSTAT data).
Swimmable Cities and water literacy
Faced with these numbers, reopening urban blue spaces is not just an urban planning battle: it is the only way to democratize access to water. It is exactly what the global network Swimmable Cities promotes, a courageous alliance of administrations and associations that, as we recount in our historical investigation into stolen open waters, fights to dismantle bans and make rivers, lakes, and ports accessible again.
But reopening the water is not enough. If we only remove the locks, urban rivers will continue to kill those who cannot afford a private swimming course. The real goal, which international manifestos are beginning to adopt, is swimming literacy: free water literacy, guaranteed to everyone from school age.
Teaching people to swim for free in the public spaces where they already live is immensely more powerful than just reopening them. It creates a process of deep identification with the lived landscape. It builds a community around the city ecosystem and allows the most marginalized groups to reclaim not only a vital skill for their own safety, but the very soul of their city.
From 2000 to today, the drowning rate worldwide has fallen by 38%. It is irrefutable proof that when people are taught to swim, they stop dying. But for this to happen on a large scale, we must stop selling swimming and start teaching it again where the water flows for free.