Italy has been under a lockdown for almost four weeks due to the steep increase in the cases of coronavirus. Now a few pictures are being circulated on social media which show dolphins swimming in clear water and swans returning to Venetian canals.
A Twitter used called Kaveri shared these pictures which have now gone viral. Her tweet has garnered over one million reactions and been retweeted over 2,81,900 times.
Another user shared the video of a dolphin and said, “The canals in Venice suddenly became insanely clean. Due to the lack of tourists in the country, it happened that nature was cleansed.”
Another user shared the video saying that ‘Venice hasn’t seen clear canal in a long time’.
However, the pictures are not from Venice. Let’s take a look at the pictures one by one.
IMAGE 1
On going through the comments of the tweet we found a user suggesting that the pictures were from Burano, a small island in Venice metropolitan area.
According to the user swans appear regularly in the canal in Burano. To check what the user had commented, we checked the location on Google maps and were able to match it.
Further, this picture from 26 January showed swans in the canal which indicates that the swans were indeed there.
IMAGE 2
The video of a dolphin swimming in the canal is also not from Venice. This picture was taken at a post in Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterrianean Sea, which is hundreds of kilometres away from Venice.
We found the video which was uploaded on a local channel called ‘Angel Media’.
Italy has recorded the highest number of death due to coronavirus in the world. On Thursday, the death toll surpassed China’s death toll.
The Quint had also earlier reported that the pictures were from Venice. The error is regretted.
(The story has been debunked by Nat Geo earlier.)
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