Things to do
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Basilique Notre-Dame de Fourvière
White stone and four corner towers on the hill the city looks up at, finished in 1884 as a thanksgiving after Lyon was spared in the Franco-Prussian war. Mosaic covers the upper church wall to wall; the crypt beneath is plainer and often emptier. A funicular runs up from Vieux Lyon, and the terrace outside carries the whole city.
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Cour des Voraces
A six-storey stair of exposed concrete rising through a courtyard on the Croix-Rousse slope, built around 1840 and the best known of the traboules, the covered passages cut through buildings so that silk could be carried down the hill dry. Canut rebels held it in 1848. It is a residential block, so visitors are asked to keep quiet and to be gone by evening.
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Halles de Lyon-Paul Bocuse
The indoor market the city's chefs shop at, named for the one who made Lyon a food destination, with about fifty stalls under one roof: Mère Richard for the aged Saint-Marcellin, Sibilia for the sausages, oyster counters where lunch is eaten standing. Closed Monday and quiet after two in the afternoon.
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Institut Lumière
The Lumière family villa in Monplaisir, on the ground where the brothers filmed workers leaving their factory in 1895 in what is generally counted the first motion picture. Cameras, hand-coloured prints and the original hangar wall are here, and the institute runs a cinema in the grounds. Metro to Monplaisir-Lumière, then two minutes on foot.
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Lugdunum
Buried in the hillside beside the Roman theatres so that nothing interrupts the site above, its galleries spiral down past the bronze tablet carrying the speech Claudius gave to the Senate arguing that Gauls should sit in it. Mosaics, a chariot and inscriptions fill the rest. The architecture is as good a reason to come as the collection.
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Maison des Canuts
A working weaving workshop on the Croix-Rousse where the guided visit puts a Jacquard loom in motion and explains the punched cards that ran it, which is the ancestor of programmed machinery. Silk is still woven here for restoration work on historic interiors. Small, hands-on, and the only place in the city where the trade is demonstrated.
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Musée des Beaux-Arts
A Benedictine abbey on the Place des Terreaux holding the largest art collection in France outside Paris: Egyptian rooms, a medallion cabinet, Perugino and Veronese, then Géricault, Manet and a strong impressionist floor. The cloister garden is open without a ticket and is one of the few quiet places in the centre.
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Musée des Confluences
Steel and glass on the point where the Rhône and Saône join, opened in 2014 after a long and expensive argument about whether it should exist. Inside is a natural history and anthropology collection arranged by question rather than by discipline, so a mammoth stands near a Tuareg tent. Reached by tram from Perrache.
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Parc de la Tête d'Or
Laid out in 1857 on marshland by the Rhône, with a boating lake, a rose garden of thousands of varieties, glasshouses from the same decade and a free zoo whose African plain was rebuilt to give the animals room. Entry costs nothing and the gates open early. Lyon treats it as a back garden.
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Pentes de la Croix-Rousse
The slope where the silk weavers worked, built in the 1820s with ceilings high enough for a Jacquard loom, which is why the windows are so tall. Stairs and traboules climb it. The 1831 revolt of the canuts began on these streets, and the quarter now runs to studios, bookshops and small bars.
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Place Bellecour
A red gravel rectangle between the two rivers, among the largest open squares in Europe and deliberately empty apart from a bronze Louis XIV and a small statue of the Little Prince, whose author was born a few streets away. The tourist office is under the north side and every walking route through the centre starts here.
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Primatiale Saint-Jean
Begun in the twelfth century and finished in the fifteenth, so the choir is Romanesque and the front is Gothic, with medieval glass surviving in the apse. The astronomical clock in the north transept dates from the fourteenth century and chimes at set hours. Beside it stand the excavated foundations of two earlier churches.
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Théâtre antique
Cut into the Fourvière slope around 15 BC and enlarged to hold ten thousand, this is the oldest Roman theatre in France and it still works: the Nuits de Fourvière festival stages opera and rock on the same stone in June and July. The smaller odeon sits alongside. Open daily and free to walk into.
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Vieux Lyon
Four streets of Renaissance houses along the Saône, built by Italian bankers and silk merchants and saved from demolition in the 1960s by the first protected-sector law in France. The interest is behind the facades: courtyards with spiral stairs and galleried landings, reached through the traboules that cut from street to street.