Venice is the clearest it has been in 60 years, and dolphins have been spotted down in southern Italy, swimming in clearer water.
The canals in Venice are clearer than they have been for a long time, due to lockdown measures taken in the face of coronavirus.
As countries and their governments are urging their populations more and more to ‘self-isolate’ and stop all non-essential travel abroad, tourist “honey traps” including Venice are seeing hardly any visitors.
And so, in Venice’s case, there is less need for transportation of any kind to be running, and the canals with less boats are coming up clean, clear and beautiful.
“The water now looks clearer because there is less traffic on the canals, allowing the sediment to stay at the bottom,” a spokesperson for the Venice mayoral office said.
He continued: “It’s because there is less boat traffic that usually brings sediment to the top of the water’s surface.”
So the water itself isn’t necessarily in any better condition or cleaner, but is less churned up. And it’s clarity seems to be to be attracting more creatures than usual. Swans and fish have even been spotted paddling and swimming around.