Around 4,200 people take part in Geneva Christmas swim

Around 4,200 take part in the Christmas swim in Geneva. Keystone-SDA

For the traditional Geneva Christmas Swim, the Coupe de Noël, this weekend, around 4,200 swimmers will take to the lake, which is almost 9°C. The first 3,700 participants, those from the Courses populaires, started on Saturday.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

For the first time, Olympic swimmers will be taking part in the canton’s oldest sporting event, the 87th Coupe de Noël de Genève. Charlotte Bonnet and Jeremy Desplanches are the patrons of this edition and will be taking part themselves on Sunday.

On Saturday Lake Geneva had a temperature of 8.71°C. On the shores of the English Garden, the participants swam in waves of around 25 people, some of them in original and scuba-safe costumes. Some swam the prescribed 100 metres dressed as mushrooms, turkeys or pirates.

+ Swiss fans of the ‘Russian-style’ dip

The Geneva Christmas Swim was introduced in 1934 and was declared part of Switzerland’s intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2023.

Adapted from German by AI/ts

How we work 

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]