Open-water swimming is something you either get or you don’t.

The Don’ts question the sanity of jumping into a cold – no, let’s say just ‘bracing’ – body of water. The Dos relish the freedom, the connection to nature, the awakening of the senses and the ability to front crawl without a plaster floating past at eye level.

If you’re in the latter group, welcome to Zürich. No other major town in Europe embraces the concept of lake and river swimming quite like here. In Switzerland’s largest city there are around 40 swimming spots to splash about in; with lake, river and outdoor pools dotted just about everywhere.

This being Switzerland, the badis (as the outdoor pools are known) are clean, elegant, efficiently run and more akin to a members’ club than a swimming pool. Some of them are for women only, some are just for men, and in the evening several turn into bars with live music and cocktails.

Some people don’t come to swim at all. The morning yoga class at Utoquai badi, on the shore of Lake Zürich itself, starts at precisely 7:05am. Here on a sunny summer day, with the snow-clad Alps still clearly visible in the middle distance despite the season, people gather to show off their expensive, crisply pressed trunks, to tan on the pontoons moored several metres from the shore, to relax with an Aperol spritz while they soak up the day’s news from the pages of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, to gossip with friends over a salmon salad and, for sure, to flirt with the attractive lifeguards of both sexes. The long building juts out over the lake, as it has since 1890. It is made up of various wooden decks divided into single- and mixed-sex areas, with a well-ordered, calm Swiss hum.otless world of well-manicured lawns, pristine wooden lockers and benches, and a graceful concrete pavilion designed in 1939 by Hermann Herter that looks like a blueprint for the USS Enterprise on Star Trek.

I walked down the steps to the lake and enjoyed the delicious crispness of the water. Not chilly, but fresh. Not many other people were around – probably beavering away in Zürich’s bank vaults – and I cut through the water at a leisurely pace enjoying the liberty that comes with not being in a lane, not being kicked by the swimmer in front and not having to think. I swam away from the shore, looking up at the city in the distance.

Towards the shoreline a diving pontoon called out to the child in me. There were three levels of boards. I chose the lowest one, which still seemed high when I teetered on the edge. With a couple of bounces I launched myself into the great unknown, landing with a splash in the water. Again, again!