Hundreds of Berliners gathered to take a dip in the Spree river Tuesday to protest a 100-year-old ban on swimming in the city's main waterway.

Billed by organisers as a "swim demonstration", the gathering saw swimmers cool off from the summer heat with colourful bathing costumes and even the odd inflatable raft against the backdrop of Berlin's famous cathedral and TV tower.

While Berlin's outer districts boast plentiful opportunities for wild swimming, mostly in the city's lakes, doing so in the Spree has been banned since 1925.

The ban was lifted briefly on Tuesday for the demonstration, but activists want a stretch of the river called the Spree canal to be permanently open to the public.

The same spot was popular with bathers in the early twentieth century before city authorities dec

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