Spectacular swimming spots: The illustrated book “The Nature of Swimming”

A gently curved bay, the beach is almost empty, with sand almost white, palm trees behind it, of course not a cloud in the sky, plus waves that are no more than knee-high and gently crawl up this beach without any surf. This is what is known as a dream beach, in our heads, in tourism advertising, on Instagram.

However, such a beach cannot be found in the illustrated book “The Nature of Swimming”, edited by Robert Klanten and Laura Allsop. Because there are much more beautiful, more spectacular, more surprising places to swim, be it in the sea, in lakes, springs, ponds or rivers. Unique places that are not as interchangeable as the always the same Caribbean or South Pacific beaches, which are wonderful to find on the one hand and completely understandable, but on the other hand also a little conventional and bourgeois.

Swim in the sea and still be protected from the surf

The volume shows bathing areas that are partly completely natural, but partly and more often have been created by humans, each integrating the natural conditions. And it is only through these installations that they become suitable for swimming. Especially in the southern hemisphere of the world, the surf is too strong in many places for you to swim in the sea safely. In any case, “The Nature of Swimming” shows several examples of pools built into the sea, but through a wall, especially from South Africa and Australia are protected from the surf. Many of these are tidal pools that are surrounded by the open sea at high tide but hold back the water at low tide. Examples of this can also be found in Europe, for example on the beaches of Saint-Malo and Saint-Quay-Portrieux in Brittany.

You don’t want to swim there in the coming weeks and months in particular, unless you are very hardened, because the water temperatures will soon drop to ten degrees or less. Nevertheless, this volume also takes you to a number of places in Europe where thermal springs are great for swimming, even in winter, sometimes with a view of snow-covered landscapes. These are mainly bathing places in Iceland, but also, for example, in Saturnia in Tuscany. As soon as there is a sauna area, a stay on the beach can be spectacular, especially in winter, even in Scandinavia and beyond geothermally heated water.

The volume is divided into a few small essays that contain some interesting cultural-historical ideas, but sometimes turn into pompous or mindful poetry album-like, into meaningful captions and, above all, into photographs that capture the atmosphere of all the places because the perspectives and lighting moods are well chosen are. The sorting is neither purely thematic nor purely geographical, which prevents “The Nature of Swimming” from acquiring a dull lexical character. Snow appears, then disappears again, before later a cold rushes over the pages again, but this is no longer frightening due to the rising steam of warm water.

You’re in Canada, Iceland, Japan. In between, the summer hits again and you are grateful for any cooling down. Natural pools by or in the sea, where rocks enclose a safe area, are particularly eye-catching.

The most beautiful beaches take advantage of the natural conditions

And then there are also examples of clever lido architecture, often in larger cities, where areas are created near the center or even in the harbor basins for a day at the beach unmolested by traffic and pollution, but which are nevertheless not sealed off from the open sea. There are such pools in Aarhus, Malmö, Dublin and Vancouver. They often take advantage of the topographical conditions.

What all the places in this photo book have in common is that they are largely not reserved for an exclusive clientele, for example because they are located on private islands or are part of luxurious hotel complexes. The vast majority are open to the public, sometimes for a manageable entrance fee; and accessibility is solely a question of the starting point and not fundamentally a question of the travel budget. You have to walk at least eight kilometers to get to the Five Water Hot Springs in the American state of Utah. But then, although it’s free, you can’t have it more individual and therefore more exclusive: The source is a thermal waterfall, the water flows out via small pools and ponds – the further away they are from the source, the more the temperature decreases. So everyone can find the perfect natural bathtub for themselves.