Lyon

Top things to do in Lyon

1. 01

   Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourviere - the white basilica over the city

   history scenic 👍 Popular

   Built after an 1870 vow that the city would be spared, and decorated to the limit: gold mosaics, marble, a crypt beneath and four corner towers over. The esplanade beside it is the free half of the visit, with the whole city laid out below and the Alps on the skyline on a clear day. The funicular climbs from Vieux Lyon in a couple of minutes; the metal tower next door, a lookalike of the top of the Eiffel Tower, is now a transmitter.

2. 02

   Vieux Lyon and its traboules - passages cut through the Renaissance blocks

   history culture arts 👍 Popular

   Europe's largest intact Renaissance quarter, and under it a network of traboules: covered passages threaded through courtyards and stairwells so silk could be carried across a block without getting wet. A few dozen are open to the public and marked with a small lion plaque by the door; the rest are people's front halls, so go quietly. The long one running between rue Saint-Jean and rue du Boeuf is the classic, and the Cour des Voraces up on the slopes has the great open staircase.

3. 03

   The bouchons - offal, pike dumplings and a pot of Beaujolais

   food ⭐ Highly recommended

   The reason people come. A bouchon is a small, loud, paper-tablecloth tavern serving the city's working cooking: quenelle de brochet under crayfish sauce, tablier de sapeur (breaded tripe), andouillette, saucisson cooked in brioche, salade lyonnaise with its poached egg, and cervelle de canut, the whipped herbed cheese named for the silk weavers. Wine comes in the squat thick-bottomed pot, Beaujolais or Cotes du Rhone, and the tradition descends from the meres lyonnaises, the women cooks who left bourgeois kitchens to run their own. Certified houses show a sticker of Gnafron, the wine-loving puppet; book ahead, and expect many to close Sundays, Mondays and much of August.

4. 04

   Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse - the covered market as larder

   food shopping ⭐ Highly recommended

   The indoor market named for the chef who held three stars for over half a century and ran French cooking from just outside town. Inside: Saint-Marcellin cheeses ripened to the point of collapse, rosette and jesus sausages hanging over the counters, quenelles sold by the tray, and pink praline tarts glowing like traffic lights. Do it the local way, standing at a stall with oysters and a glass of white before noon.

5. 05

   Theatres romains de Fourviere and the Lugdunum museum

   history 👍 Popular

   Two Roman theatres cut into the hillside, the larger begun under Augustus and still used for a summer festival of music and theatre. The museum is buried in the slope beside them, a concrete spiral holding the bronze Claudian Table, on which the emperor born in this city argues for admitting Gauls to the Senate, and the Coligny calendar, the longest surviving text in Gaulish.

6. 06

   Fete des Lumieres - the city lit up in early winter

   culture arts

   Lyon's biggest event by a distance, and the one thing that fills the city out of season. It began as a vow to the Virgin and a habit of setting candles in the windows, and has grown into several nights of light installations, projections and video mapping thrown across the facades, squares and riverbanks, with the crowds moving through the streets until late. Beds go months ahead and the centre closes to traffic; residents still put the little glass candles on their sills, which is the part worth looking up for.

7. 07

   Marche Saint-Antoine - the riverbank market and the machon habit

   food

   The long open-air food market on the Saone quay, running most mornings apart from Monday, with the Croix-Rousse boulevard market doing the same job up on the hill and an art and crafts market taking the opposite bank on Sundays. Pair it with a machon if you can find one: the canuts' mid-morning meal of charcuterie and a pot of red, eaten at an hour that feels wrong and tastes right.

8. 08

   Croix-Rousse - the hill that worked, and revolted

   history culture arts

   The silk weavers moved up here when the Jacquard loom needed tall ceilings, and the plateau still feels like a village bolted onto a city: a daily market along the boulevard, independent bars, and steep stairways down through the slopes. The Maison des Canuts runs working looms, the Mur des Canuts is a trompe-l'oeil mural big enough to fool you from across the street, and the amphitheatre of the Three Gauls sits in a small park below.

9. 09

   Musee des Beaux-Arts - the abbey palace on Place des Terreaux

   culture arts

   One of France's great collections outside the capital, in a former Benedictine abbey with a quiet cloister garden in the middle: Egyptian antiquities, old masters, a strong Impressionist floor. The square outside carries Bartholdi's four plunging horses, by the sculptor who made the Statue of Liberty, and Buren's grid of low granite fountains across the paving.

10. 10

    Parc de la Tete d'Or - the botanical park on the Rhone

    nature wildlife scenic

    One of the largest urban parks in France, laid out in the English style around a boating lake, with a free zoo, a rose garden of thousands of varieties and enormous nineteenth-century glasshouses. It is where the city runs, rows and eats its lunch, and the easiest hour to spend with children.

11. 11

    Musee des Confluences - the crystal where the rivers meet

    culture arts

    A jagged steel-and-glass building on the spit where the Rhone takes in the Saone, more sculpture than museum from outside. Inside it deliberately mixes natural history and anthropology in the same rooms, so a mammoth skeleton shares a floor with an Egyptian mummy and a Melanesian mask, arguing that everything is one story.

12. 12

    Institut Lumiere - where the first film was shot

    culture arts history

    The Lumiere family villa in Monplaisir, and beside it the surviving hangar wall of the factory whose workers walked out of the gates in 1895 to make the first film. The museum covers the cinematograph and the brothers' colour photography, and the institute screens restored classics year-round, with a festival of them each autumn.

13. 13

    Cathedrale Saint-Jean - the astronomical clock in the old city

    history

    Romanesque at the choir and Gothic by the time it reached the front, with a fourteenth-century astronomical clock that tracks saints' days and moving feasts and still chimes through its automata. Two church councils met here in the thirteenth century, and the archbishop of Lyon is still styled Primate of the Gauls.

14. 14

    Centre d'Histoire de la Resistance et de la Deportation

    history

    Housed in the building the Gestapo used as its headquarters under Klaus Barbie, in the city that called itself the capital of the Resistance. It handles the clandestine press, the networks, the deportations and Barbie's trial here in the 1980s soberly, and the cellars are part of the visit.

15. 15

    Guignol - the silk worker's puppet, still on stage

    culture arts

    Invented by a canut who turned tooth-puller and needed a crowd, Guignol became the French Punch: a sharp-tongued weaver who talks back to landlords and police, with the perpetually thirsty Gnafron beside him. Small theatres in the old city still play him, in French, and the shows for adults are funnier than the ones for children.

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