Mainly in summer holidays, we observe millions of people at the beaches. Of course there are other groups of people visiting the beach like the winter bathers & the romantic ones.

Either millions or some few, those gatherings are social facts that produce community links, group relations & social ceremonies. The sociologist Jean Didier Urbain analyses the way   those social facts & the underlying behaviors are integrated by society as necessary functions of it. When integrated they can only reproduce the social models of stratification & class structure. Like all social facts they carry the history of their organization & development. That means that we find in any modern social fact some elements of previous phases of development.

He starts from the history of the development of the bathing habits & behaviors in the 19^th century and reaches the contemporary period of the body worship. The 19^th century witnesses two kinds of approach of the beach: the romantic one, that of poets, artists and scholars who views the beach as an island of inspiration and the approach of the medicine.

The 20^th century saw the victory of the human body freedom & its transformation into a channel of symbolic messages.

The author develops his theoretical & analytical approach within the axis of the Robinson Crusoe adventure. He compares the search of community relations on the beach to the research of a secret & lonely island away from society like the one on which the true Robinson Crusoe lived in the 18^th century. At the beach, the population of the organized society splits into tribes where each one develops its own & differentiated linguistic code in order to establish a symbolic & mythological occupation of the land. 

I have taken the winter bathers of Volos at the Plakes beach as example to analyze through the analytical grid of J.D.Urbain in order to examine the value of his concepts. I found that some of them could be applied to this group of people. Like the tribes characteristics, the medicine myths, the group dynamic & solidarity,  thus conducting in the structure of a small human group with true identity & personality living a status & not playing roles like the summer people at the beach.