A new public beach officially opened in Geneva on Saturday. The specially built Eaux-Vives beach on Lake Geneva, which has views of the Jet d’Eau fountain, has been over ten years in the making. The free 400-metre-long Eaux-Vives beach, near the La Grange Park and the Genève Plage complex, will be able to welcome 8,000 people a day when it is fully open. Strict rules ban music, barbecues, dogs, bicycles and roller blades at the site. The project to build a new beach has been years in the making. It was initiated in 2008 by the Green parliamentarian Robert Cramer but was delayed in 2013 after a successful appeal by the environmental group WWF against the size of the embankments planned in order to build the beach. An amended project with smaller embankments, estimated at a total cost of CHF67 million ($68 million), finally went ahead. Work on the stony beach, lawns and nearby reedy marsh has taken two years, but is not fully complete. Construction work is also continuing to ...
