‘Wonderfully Swiss, slightly mad’: This IT guy swims to work while cleaning Zürich’s waterways

By Angela Symons & Misha Gurov Published on 05/09/2026 - 7:03 GMT+2 On learning that some Swiss commuters swim into work, IT professional Mischa Gurov recalls thinking it was “wonderfully Swiss – and slightly mad”. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Now, the Russian native is one of them. After moving to Zürich in 2019, he decided to trade crowded trams and trains for a cool swim down the city’s old moat. When the weather is on his side, he takes public transport into the city centre, changes into swimwear and, with his belongings in a waterproof bag, he jumps into the Schanzengraben (‘fortification moat’) for the last 1.35 kilometres of his journey. “It’s the best way to start a working day,” Mischa tells Euronews Earth. “Sometimes I see the sunrise at the lake before my swim or I observe swans taking their morning bath. Other times, several fish swim with me for many metres – it is truly a special feeling of harmony.” So far this year, he’s swum more than 60 kilometres. But this summer’s drought-induced low water levels gave him a new perspective on his journey. ‘A part of the city that’s hard to see from the street’ Alongside the canal are trams, bicycles, offices and people moving through Zürich. But, taking an underwater camera with him on a recent commute, Mischa discovered “fish, old stone walls and a part of the city that is much harder to see from the street”. “I realised nature is not necessarily somewhere far away in an ocean, rainforest or mountain. Sometimes there is an entire world living almost unnoticed beneath a bridge people cross every day,” he says. He even managed to photograph a large fish that he later – with the help of the city’s waste disposal and water protection organisation Entsorgung + Recycling Zürich (ERZ) – identified as one of the Schanzengraben’s rarer brown trout. These fish need clean, cool, oxygen-rich water to survive, so their presence is testament to the quality of the water. But a lack of care for their hidden world could be putting this at risk. 500 cigarette butts along 30 metres of the Schanzengraben Mischa has long been frustrated by rubbish left in places he loves. Living in London in 2018, he launched an anti-littering petition to clean up Richmond Park and the River Thames. The same issue has become difficult to ignore in Zürich. Earlier this summer, he decided to see how many cigarette butts he could collect along a short stretch beside the Schanzengraben. In 30 minutes, across roughly 30 metres, he collected more than 500. Cigarette butts are Switzerland’s most littered item nationally, with over six billion discarded into the environment each year, costing an estimated CHF 53 million (€56m) in cleanup. In water, the toxins they leach can be lethal to fish.