Vacationers heading to European capitals this summer for museums, culture, and fine dining can squeeze in an afternoon at the beach without ever leaving the city.

Stretches of sand are being trucked in to urban riverfronts to create the feeling of a lazy day at the shore, just a seashell’s throw from the shops and busy streets of Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Budapest, Rome, and Berlin.

These sand-in-the-city installations are designed for urbanites who don’t have money or time for a summer holiday on the Riviera or the Baltic Sea. Several of them have been running for three or four summers and have been a huge success, drawing thousands of city-dwellers to sit in the sun in their bathing suits and dig their toes in the sand.

Bikini-clad sun worshippers have flocked to the Paris Plage – as the trucked-in sand along the Seine River is known – since it started in the summer of 2001. The Paris beach, scheduled to open again this year for a month beginning July 21, offers deck chairs, beach bars, and concerts.

The 2005 installation will have a Brazilian theme, complete with stretches of sand named Ipanema and Copacabana, lush greenery to conjure up visions of the Amazon, concerts of Brazilian music, a samba school, and beach soccer.

In Rome, a stretch of beach called Tiber Village opened June 18 on the banks of the Tiber River. The beach, lying in the shadows of St. Peter’s Basilica and Castel Sant’Angelo, is built with trucked-in sand and synthetic grass. Visitors have access to showers, swimming pools, deck chairs, bars, and restaurants. It’s scheduled to remain open until September 17.

Man-made sandbars are installed in several locations along the Spree River in Berlin. The urban beaches will remain open through September. Palm trees, boardwalks, beach chairs, and cocktails add to the illusion of a seaside in the city, and visitors can even take a dip in the Spree Bridge Bathing Ship, a heated pool in the hull of a container ship in the river.

An urban beach scene in Belgium’s capital city called the Brussels Spa will unfold from July 22 to August 21. Called Bruxelles les Bains in French and Brussel Bad in Dutch, it is located along the Quai des Peniches, not far from the city center. Visitors can attend concerts, play beach volleyball or other sports, walk through a bamboo forest, or visit shops and restaurants.

Since the summer of 2003, Amsterdam has set up a sandy beach on the banks of the Ij Lake, just behind Centraal Station. Although it’s been a big hit, a drowning last summer raised safety concerns and prompted the city to erect big orange fences between the beach and water.

For the past two years in downtown Budapest, a road along the Danube River has been turned into a beach in August. Dubbed the Budapest Plage, the mile-long beach with sandboxes and potted palm trees attracted thousands of people even though swimming in the river was not allowed. The project drew criticism from motorists, however, who complained it caused traffic jams.

So far this year, city officials have rejected a request to reopen the beach in the same place, on the Pest side of the Danube, but organizers are appealing the decision. In the meantime, a beach is planned for the other side of the river from July 1 to 31.