If you are wondering what to do in Lyon, let me start with a confession: I went there thinking of it as a stopover city, and I came away convinced it is one of the most beautiful in France.
Lyon is France’s third city by population, and it is very old. Founded by the Romans in 43 BC under the name of Lugdunum, it was the capital of Gaul and the birthplace of two emperors, Claudius and Caracalla. Later it became the European capital of silk, and at the end of the nineteenth century the city where cinema was invented.
The result of all that layering is something few people know: since 5 December 1998 the historic site of Lyon has been a UNESCO World Heritage site, and not for a single monument but for 427 hectares, roughly 10% of the city: Vieux Lyon, Fourvière hill, the slopes of Croix-Rousse and much of the Presqu’île.
Want to know more?
Let’s go!
1 – Vieux Lyon, the Renaissance quarter
Vieux Lyon, the old town, is where to start, and it is one of the largest surviving Renaissance quarters in Europe.
It stretches between the Saône and Fourvière hill, and it is a maze of lanes with fifteenth and sixteenth-century houses, tall and narrow, their ground floors now full of colourful shop windows. Those houses were not built poor: they went up for the families of Italian, German and Flemish merchants and bankers who had made Lyon one of the great financial centres of Europe, drawn here by its trade fairs.
Walk along the river and look up now and then: at the least expected moments the view opens onto the Gothic cathedral or the hill, and those are the glimpses that made me fall for this city.
2 – Getting lost in the traboules
This is the most Lyonnais thing you can do, and it is free.
The traboules are covered passageways that cut through buildings and connect one street to another, often through inner courtyards and spiral staircases. They were not built as an attraction: they were service shortcuts, made to carry goods and water without going round the block.
Their moment of glory came with silk. In the nineteenth century the Croix-Rousse hill was “la colline qui travaille”, the hill that works, where thirty thousand canuts (Lyon’s silk weavers) lived and worked in houses with high ceilings built to fit their looms. The traboules were used to carry the bolts of silk under cover, safe from the rain. And then they served another purpose: during the canut revolts of 1831 and 1834 and, a century later, for the Resistance, because in that labyrinth it was impossible to chase anyone who knew it.
How many are there? Far more than you would think. Within the UNESCO perimeter around five hundred have been recorded: 215 courtyards and traboules in Vieux Lyon, 163 on the slopes of Croix-Rousse and 130 in the Presqu’île.
The most spectacular is the Cour des Voraces, at 9 place Colbert in Croix-Rousse: a monumental open-air staircase climbing six storeys in several flights. Fair warning, the entrance is not inviting, you go in through an ordinary doorway and the smell is not always the best, but then you find yourself inside something that resembles nothing else. You go in from one side of the hill and come out two blocks higher up.
Many traboules are in lived-in buildings: entry is free but you go in quietly, and some are only open at certain hours.
3 – Saint-Jean cathedral and the clock that started chiming again
At the foot of the hill stands the cathedral of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, the religious heart of the city. The building site ran for three centuries, and you can see it: the choir is still Romanesque, the nave and the façade are Gothic.
But the thing to look for is in the left transept, and it is one of the most extraordinary machines you can see in a church: the astronomical clock. It dates from 1379 and still runs largely on its original mechanism, made of forged iron gears, weights and a large pendulum. It is considered the oldest clock still working in a cathedral, and it has been a listed historic monument since 1862. It does not just tell the time: it shows the position of the Moon, the movable feasts of the Christian calendar, and it sets a series of automata in motion.
And here comes the update that pleases me most in this whole article. In the first version of this post I wrote that the figures move and the clock chimes every hour from noon to 4 pm. That was true when I was there, and then it was not: an act of vandalism in 2013 silenced the clock for more than ten years.
The good news is that on 20 September 2024 the clock started working again: the five carillon bells rang and the automata moved for the first time in a decade. If you go now, you can hear it. Check the times of the animations at the entrance, because they have changed.
4 – Fourvière, the hill that prays
If Croix-Rousse is the hill that works, Fourvière is “la colline qui prie”, the hill that prays. And it is the spot from which you understand Lyon.
Getting up there is easy on the funicular that leaves from Vieux Lyon (it is part of the public transport network, so an ordinary ticket covers it) and drops you right in front of the basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière.
The basilica is more recent than it looks. Work began in 1872 to a design by the architect Pierre Bossan, continued by his pupil Louis Sainte-Marie Perrin: the building was practically finished in 1884 and the solemn consecration came in 1896. It is an openly declared hybrid of Romanesque and Byzantine, with four corner towers, and inside it is a blaze of golden mosaics that divides opinion: to me it looked like a fairy-tale castle, to others it is excessive.
Next to it stands the tour métallique, an 1894 lattice tower that looks like the tip of the Eiffel Tower set down on a hill (and yes, the quotation is deliberate). From the terrace in front of the basilica the view takes in the whole city, both rivers and, on clear days, Mont Blanc.
5 – Lugdunum: the museum and the Roman theatres
On the same hill, a couple of minutes from the basilica, is the place I mentioned only in passing in the first version of this post and which actually deserves half a day.
First a note about its name, because it matters if you are searching online: what everyone used to call the “Gallo-Roman museum of Fourvière” has, since 8 November 2017, been called Lugdunum - Musée et théâtres romains, and with the new name the perimeter changed too: the ticket now covers both the museum and the archaeological site of the two Roman theatres on the hill.
The museum is a masterpiece of brutalist architecture by Bernard Zehrfuss, sunk into the hillside: you walk down a spiral ramp and the windows open directly onto the theatres. And then there are the mosaics, which is the reason I am telling you to go in: I did not want to, I went in by chance and came out won over. I had never seen them displayed like that.
Outside are the ancient theatre (the oldest in France) and the odeon, set in a garden. The theatre is still in use: in summer it hosts the Nuits de Fourvière festival, and seeing a concert in there is worth the trip on its own.
I wrote a dedicated post about it: the Roman museum of Lyon.
6 – Place des Terreaux and the Bartholdi fountain
Come down from the hill, cross the Saône and you are in the Presqu’île, the peninsula between the two rivers. Here is the finest square in the city: place des Terreaux (the name comes from the earthworks that once stood here).
The square is framed by the monumental seventeenth-century Hôtel de Ville and by the Museum of Fine Arts, the second painting museum in France after the Louvre, which I covered in a separate post.
At the centre stands the Bartholdi fountain, by the very same Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi who designed the Statue of Liberty. And it has a funny story.
Bartholdi conceived it in 1857 for a competition held by the city of Bordeaux, which wanted to decorate the place des Quinconces. The design represented the Garonne and its tributaries racing towards the sea: a woman holding the reins of a chariot pulled by four bolting horses, with harnesses shaped like seaweed and the floor of the chariot made of a shell. Bordeaux never built it. The fountain ended up on show at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, where Lyon bought it, and in September 1892 it was installed here.
So yes: Lyon’s fountain represents a river that does not flow through Lyon. The people of Lyon have reinterpreted it as France and its great rivers, which is an affectionate and useful reading, but the Garonne remains the Garonne.
One figure I took from bad sources in the first version and now correct: the fountain weighs 21 tonnes, not 360. It is made of lead modelled over an iron armature, an unusual and delicate technique, and precisely for that reason between 2015 and 2017 it was dismantled, restored and put back in an operation costing 2.75 million euros. If you saw it before and it looks different, you are not wrong: it is clean now.
Water comes out of five jets at the top and falls onto the horses’ backs, giving the impression of a chariot gliding over water.
7 – Lyon, the city where cinema was born
This chapter was missing, and for a blog about art that is unforgivable.
Cinema was born in Lyon, in a shed belonging to the Lumière family factory. In 1895 Louis Lumière used the cinématographe, the device he had developed with his brother Auguste, to shoot a film a few seconds long called “La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon”: the workers leaving at the end of the day. It is the first film in history to be shown to an audience.
That shed still exists: it is the hangar du Premier-Film, the last remnant of the Lumière works, registered as a historic monument in 1992 and classified in 1994 for the centenary of cinema, restored in 1998 and sheltered by a modern structure by Pierre Colboc. Today it is a cinema where the Institut Lumière screens classics and rarities every day.
Beside it is the Villa Lumière, the family house, which holds the museum: the original cinématographe, the first colour photographs (the autochromes, another of their inventions) and a wealth of curious objects.
If you love cinema, this is the stop that makes Lyon different from any other French city.
8 – What and where to eat in Lyon
Lyon is considered the gastronomic capital of France, and that is not guidebook exaggeration: this is where the tradition of the “mères lyonnaises” was born, the women cooks who between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries opened their own restaurants and trained generations of chefs, and this is where Paul Bocuse worked.
The place to eat local is called a bouchon: small trattoria-like restaurants with checked tablecloths, Lyonnais cooking and Rhône valley wines at reasonable prices. Careful though, because the name is overused: look for the certified “Bouchons Lyonnais” sign, or ask locals. I loved them: good food, beautifully kept interiors and honest bills.
What to order:
- the quenelle, a soft dumpling of semolina and pike in a Nantua sauce of crayfish: it is the dish of Lyon;
- the cervelle de canut, which despite the name (“weaver’s brain”) is a fresh cheese spread with herbs, garlic and shallots, born as a poor man’s dish of the canuts;
- the saucisson brioché and the andouillette, for the brave;
- the tarte aux pralines, bright pink, the signature sweet of the city.
For the covered market: the Halles Paul Bocuse are the right place for cheese, charcuterie and oysters, even just for lunch at the counter.
A correction to myself, because in the first version of this post I recommended a baked-potato chain restaurant as though it were a Lyonnais speciality. It is not. The confusion comes from “pommes de terre à la lyonnaise”, which are simply potatoes sautéed with onions: “à la lyonnaise”, in French cooking, means exactly “with onions”. Delicious, but a side dish, not a reason to travel. I have cut the recommendation.
And for breakfast, any of the boulangeries in Vieux Lyon: the local brioches studded with pink pralines are a discovery.
Practical information for visiting Lyon
Getting there. From Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport the link is the Rhônexpress, a tram-train that reaches Part-Dieu station in about 30 minutes. Check the price online before you travel: when I went the return ticket was around 20 € with a student discount, but the fares have changed. By train, Lyon is two hours from Paris by TGV.
Getting around. The network is excellent: four metro lines, trams, buses and the two Fourvière funiculars, all on the same ticket. The centre is very walkable anyway.
Where to stay. The best area is the Presqu’île, the peninsula between the Rhône and the Saône: it is close to everything, it has the best views over the riversides, and from there you reach anything on foot or one metro stop away.
The Lyon City Card. If you are doing the museums it is worth it, and here are the up-to-date numbers: the 24-hour version costs 26.90 € (48, 72 and 96-hour versions also exist) and it covers unlimited transport, funiculars included, entry to over twenty museums including the Fine Arts, Lugdunum, the Lumière museum and the Musée des Confluences, plus a cruise on the Saône and a guided visit of Croix-Rousse. Given that a day transport ticket plus two museums gets you close to that anyway, the Lyon City Card pays for itself quickly. There is also a version that includes the Rhônexpress. If instead you are only coming to wander between traboules and riverbanks, you need nothing: that Lyon is free.
When to go. Spring and autumn are the best seasons. But if you can choose, try to be there around 8 December, for the Fête des Lumières: for four evenings the city turns into a city-wide light installation, with works by international artists projected on the monuments, and the people of Lyon put candles on their windowsills as they have done here since 1852. It is one of the most beautiful things you can see in Europe in winter, and it needs booking months ahead.
Lyon also makes an excellent base for the Rhône valley and central France. If you are building a French itinerary, the blog has guides to Paris and Montmartre, to Rouen and to Orléans, and for more on the two museums mentioned here: the Roman museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. Lyon is also the twelfth stop in my guide to what to see in France beyond Paris, the only one where it is worth staying more than a day.
And you, would you come to Lyon for the traboules, for the Roman mosaics or for the bouchons?
