“Paris plage” is originally the name of the railway line that connects the city to the ocean. And it is this holiday spirit that has punctuated the 20 editions of this major project of the Bertrand Delanoë mandate. Parasols, deckchairs, sand and palm trees: all the accessories of the beach are then present on the banks of the Seine. Objective: to bring holidays and the beach to Parisians who do not have the opportunity to go there.
And who says beach says swimming. It is forbidden to cool off in the Seine so the Town Hall adapts. In 2003, during the heat wave, misters, water fountains and showers were installed on the quays. Four years later, swimming pools appeared on the Canal de l’Ourcq in the 19th arrondissement. These are the basins of La Villette, the second site of Paris Plages.
2015, an ecological turning point: goodbye sand
The first editions, there was even sand. “We brought up to 5,000 tonnes of sand a year to develop Paris Plage”, explains Stéphane Chave, head of major events at the city of Paris. Enough to create real islands. The man present since the beginning of the device remembers the 2015 edition, his favorite. “It was a wooden beach that undulated like a wave. In the morning, the sand was all well raked with deckchairs like on beaches in the South”.
2015 was the last edition with sand because the Mayor of Paris then decided to take a more ecological turn: now grass and wood, more easily reusable outside the summer, are favoured.