It was only my second week in Vienna when a resident took me to swim in the Danube. It was an experience that moved me – quite literally. After relocating to the Austrian capital, I fell in love with early morning swims at Badeareal an der Promenade der Unteren Alten Donau. Emerging from a brisk 20-minute trip to Donaustadtbrücke station, you navigate along paths dotted with cottages, reeds and a series of wooden piers overlooking a tranquil part of the canal. It attracts ardent, older swimmers (plus one impressively strong, grey-haired man who paddleboards). The piers are filled with students working on their tan lines and flirting in groups. In Vienna, there is a swimming spot for everyone, no matter your plunging particularities.

Walking towards the Alte Donau station, it becomes a little more crowded, with groups taking over park spots and stone steps. Those looking for something livelier bring speakers and rent small platform boats – that often have palm-tree-shaped umbrellas for shade – or take out a trusty pedalo. Most tend to bring cherries and a cool box but if you forget you can always don something presentable and book a waterside table at Das Bootshaus for a Hugo spritz and calamari. The restaurant is run by the Querfeld family group, which owns Café Landtmann and the Loos-designed Café Museum in the city’s first district – the family’s sons are competitive rowers who trained at the club next door.

But it’s Strandbad Gänsehäufel – known as “the lido on Goose Island” – for which the masses have fallen. It’s a classic, modernist swimming option that attracts families and older clientele for a small fee. Revamped by architects Max Fellerer, Carl Appel and Eugen Wörle in the late 1940s, it’s a multi-generational space with volleyball, a climbing park, schnitzel sandwiches and 2km of manicured beach. Though the water here is not without issues – its algae and underwater foliage needs to be cut back at bimonthly intervals. However, the city is vigilant about keeping the water clean and well-trimmed.

If you like things a little more bourgeois, head to Bundesbad Alte Donau, where the water flows a little faster and feels even fresher. “It is my all-time favourite spot,” says Monica Titton, who teaches fashion history and theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. “It used to be a military swimming school; today it is listed and owned by the Republic of Austria, so it is kept in absolutely spotless condition. The architecture folds beautifully into the landscape, with a lovely restaurant with white wire chairs, a little terrace and plenty of places to relax.”

For the wild and rebellious, Donauinsel is the pick. Don’t expect beds here, just dive in and wade through the reeds. The manmade island, originally built in the 1980s to prevent flooding, is also the place for which you’re likely to receive late-night party invites – many take place among the 1.8 million trees planted here. 

The early risers working near the UN at the Vienna International Centre dive in at Kaiserwasser for a swim between meetings. Meanwhile, nudists head to the upper section of Neue Donau, near Floridsdorf, for some privacy. Many residents also jump on a train to Bad Vöslau – a Wes Anderson-style thermal spa that has been attracting people since the 1820s. Alternatively, they head to the Schönbrunner Bad pool above the imperial castle for a regal bathe that’s best enjoyed before noon, with sunbathers on the lawn drinking coffee where Emperor Franz Joseph kept his paddling pool.

Despite the city’s bounty, some residents are campaigning to increase swimming in the heart of the city. The Swimmable Cities platform aims to use urban waterways to build climate-resilient cities. “Cities should think about wastewater and flood management systems as something multiuse that could bring more vitality to a place,” says Ana Mumladze Detering, co-founder of Schwimmverein Donaukanal (Swimming Association of the Danube Canal). The group’s aim is to make swimming part of everyday life. “Vienna is really good at managing its waterways but more people need to cool down. Eventually, other cities will have to follow suit.”

Francesca Gavin is a Vienna-based journalist and regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Cinema has always sold the fantasy of the transformative summer spent outdoors (writes Leila Latif). It’s the kind found in The Sandlot’s sunburnt baseball summer, Wes Anderson’s runaway-lovers in Moonrise Kingdom and Luca Guadagnino’s Italian peach-orchard romance Call Me by Your Name. Films in which children and adults alike do away with the supervision and trappings of modern life to acquire grass stains on their clothing thanks to whimsical and/or sexy antics. This used to be a gentle suggestion to break free but the message has lost its subtlety lately.

The recently released Toy Story 5 mourns childhoods lost to the eerie hum of a handheld tablet. Bold, brilliant series Silo is a prestige sci-fi epic about the horror of not being allowed outside. In season three, viewers get to see just how we, in the imminent near future, end up underground dreaming of fresh air. Indie horror hit Backrooms’ monster lives in an infinite windowless hallway that is, functionally, doomscrolling with teeth.

Meanwhile, the film The Last House, starring Wagner Moura and Greta Lee, traps a family indoors for years as they stare longingly at the outside that once was. Even the cosier titles are in on it: the Little House on the Prairie reboot pines for a life with no screens and series Every Year After finds two people falling in love on the strength of one unplugged week a year at a lake with no texts in between – and somehow none needed.

Whether they are told on TV or the big screen and whether they concern monsters or lovers, these stories share one message: go outside.

Out in the real world, a spell of heatwaves has settled like a haze over Europe and many other places around the world. It’s the kind of languid heat that makes running into the sea or diving into a public pool a form of public-safety announcement. At the same time, the UK has recently announced a ban on social media for under-16s, hoping to usher an entire generation into the great outdoors.
 
At a point in history when many of us are worried about the prospect of soon living in a hauntingly grim technological dystopia, we must admit that our machines are giving us fair warning about the dangers of losing ourselves to screens. This summer we just have to look up from them and act on it.

Further reading? 
– Meet the daredevil stunt performers helping Europe’s film-making industry reach new extremes

– The star maker’s long game: Why casting director Nina Gold is the film industry’s new standard 

– The Cinephile’s 2026 checklist: A Berlin icon, a Brazilian hit and the Criterion closet

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