A young boy was rushed to hospital in Reykjavik yesterday following an accident at the swimming pool in Selfoss, south Iceland, just before 14.00. Read the full story

Reykjavik city authorities have decided to hold a ‘swimming vigil’ at the city’s biggest swimming pool, keeping it open non-stop for nearly a week. Read the full story

The Grand Hotel Reykjavik provided their award winning service to this year’s record-breaking paralympic athletes at the 2009 IPC Swimming European Championships held between 18th-24th October. Collectively, 24 world records and 73 European records were smashed over the course of the seven-day event. Read the full story

Today is the first main event day at the 2009 International Paralympic Committee Swimming European Championships, being held in Reykjavik. The event will last until Saturday. Read the full story

Swedes, Norwegians and Danes were all victims of river-related drownings, in what proved to be a deadly weekend for outdoor recreationists in Scandinavia. Norway and Denmark were the sites of at least five deaths from boating accidents and hiking mishaps. Read the full story

To make it easier for foreign visitors to Iceland to connect with Iceland’s hundreds of geothermal swimming options, the website swimminginiceland.com was created. Read the full story

In a controversial ruling by Australia’s swimming regulatory body, Swim Australia, one of Sweden’s most famous swimmers was disqualified, after breaking her own world record, for wearing two swimsuits. Therese Alshammar was told her new world record in the 50 metre butterfly at the Australian Championships was ruled out due to new regulations regarding swimsuits. Read the full story

Perhaps the thought of topless sunbathing at a chlorinated concrete public pool isn’t appealing, or it could be a hint that Danish women are actually shy about exposing themselves. But either way, a new law passed in March allowing women to go topless at city pools across Copenhagen has been met with absolute disregard.

The Socialist People’s Party felt they had achieved a successful coup Read the full story

Two Estonians became the first people in recorded history to successfully swim across the Gulf of Finland. They started their effort in Finland and ended it in Estonia, taking nearly a full day to complete the swim.

Six Estonians with professional swimming experience, five men and one woman, made the attempt to cross the stretch of water between Estonia and Finland, but only two of them made it to the other side. Priit Vehm and Bruno Nopponen were successful in swimming the 55kms, Nopponen finished first with a time of 19 hours and 13 minutes, while Vehm took around 3 hours longer.

The swimmers began in the Finnish port of Porkkala and reached land in the Estonian village of Suurupi. Estonians followed the event in real time through the Internet, as each swimmer was wearing a GPS signal. Estonia is been nicknamed “E-Stonia” for its Internet knowledge.

Although there is no existing record of a successful swim across the Gulf of Finland, an Estonian named Aleksander Laas reportedly swam 40kms from an Estonian island to Porkkala in 1931. Up until 1991, the Gulf of Finland was one of the world’s most heavily-patrolled bodies of water due to the proximity of Leningrad (St Petersburg) and the Soviet Union.

A new database of hot springs, lakes, streams and local swimming pools has been launched on the website Sundlaugar.is, for the benefit of Icelanders and visitors, according to IcelandReview.com.

The site aims to fill a gap discovered by the site’s owner, Robert van Spanje, who is actually Dutch. He was having difficulty finding places to swim in the summer and, noting that it was a popular activity with so many good places to bathe in the country, he decided to publish the list of more than 200 pools he’s so far identified.

“Looking for such an overview of swimming pools myself, I was surprised to find only bits and pieces when swimming pools are such a big part of Iceland and its culture,” he said.

Developed initially as a final project at the Reykjavik School of Multimedia, the site is in its developmental stages but hopes to include interactivity in due course. It’s published in five different languages and includes both natural and man-made pools.