Sibylle van der Walt, Swimming in the Moselle River and Metz Ville d’Eau

Before the pandemic, some friends in Metz, a mid-sized city in France, near Strasbourg, were looking for somewhere to swim outdoors. The Moselle River flows through Metz, on its way to the North German wine country, before joining with the Rhine at Koblenz. This seemed the right place to make a new swimming place, in the Moselle River in and around Metz. Sibylle van der Walt was one of this group of friends. From this desire to swim in the local river, which was often contaminated in the ways that so many rivers in the Global North are, came a group, Metz Ville d’Eau, Metz City of Water. Sibylle was central to this group, with the intention of making the Moselle at Metz much more regularly swimmable. Metz Ville d’Eau continues, going from strength to strength. Since then. Metz Ville d’Eau has joined hands with other environmental groups, city councils and water-focussed agencies in the Swimmable Cities Alliance, where organizations across the world coordinate activities for making cleaner and accessible urban waterways more available to citizens who swim, and for blue spaces more generally. Sibylle van der Walt is central to the development and growth of the Swimmable Cities Alliance, which had its first Summit in Rotterdam in June 2025. In this podcast we discuss how Metz Ville d’Eau has been fashioned as a model campaign for urban river swimming.