Islands Brygge Harbour Bath

The idea that you could swim in Copenhagen's harbour would have been laughable thirty years ago. The water was filthy — decades of industrial pollution, untreated sewage, and shipping traffic had turned the harbour into something you crossed on a boat but would never willingly enter. Then Copenhagen embarked on one of the most ambitious urban water quality campaigns in European history, investing billions of kroner in wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and harbour cleanup. By 2002, the water was clean enough to swim in, and Islands Brygge Harbour Bath opened as the first public swimming facility directly in the harbour.

Designed by PLOT Architects (Bjarke Ingels and Julien De Smedt before they split into BIG and JDS), the harbour bath consists of five pools — a diving pool, two children's pools, and two swimming lanes — built on platforms extending into the harbour. The design is elegantly simple: wooden decking, angular diving towers, and direct access to the harbour water. It is free to use, open from June to September, and on a hot summer day, thousands of Copenhageners pack the surrounding lawns and platforms. The water quality is monitored daily and a flag system indicates whether swimming is safe.

Islands Brygge itself was once an industrial waterfront, and its transformation into one of Copenhagen's most desirable residential neighbourhoods is directly linked to the harbour baths. The swimming facility proved that the harbour could be a public amenity, not just an industrial corridor, and the property values followed. Today, several harbour baths operate across Copenhagen, but Islands Brygge was the first and remains the most popular.

What makes this genuinely remarkable is the ambition behind it. Copenhagen decided its harbour should be clean enough to swim in, spent the money, did the engineering, and delivered. The harbour bath is not just a swimming pool — it is physical proof that a city can reverse decades of environmental damage. Watching Copenhageners dive into water that was once too toxic to touch is one of the most hopeful things you can witness in any European city.