Lyon travel guide

Top 10 sights in Lyon

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   Lugdunum

   The Roman city founded in 43 BC on the hill above the rivers, and capital of the three Gallic provinces — effectively the administrative centre of Roman Gaul. The emperor Claudius was born in it, and its two theatres and the aqueduct arcades survive.

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2. 

   2© Jastrow · CC BY 2.5

   Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon

   Museum in Lyon, opened in 1801 in a Benedictine abbey of the seventeenth century. Its seventy rooms run from Egyptian antiquities to Picasso, and the cloister garden is open to all.

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3. 

   3© Otourly · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Lyon Cathedral

   A cathedral built between 1180 and 1476, so its choir is Romanesque and its front high Gothic, in a city that was primate of all Gaul. Its fourteenth-century astronomical clock still works and runs a small mechanical Annunciation four times a day.

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   4© Dennis G. Jarvis · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière

   A basilica built by public subscription between 1872 and 1896 on the hill, after a vow that the Prussians would not reach Lyon — which they did not. Its interior is mosaic and marble from floor to vault, and the terrace gives the whole city and the Alps.

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5. 

   5© Claude · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Place Bellecour

   Six hectares of open gravel between the two rivers, one of the largest squares in Europe with no trees on it at all and, being closed to traffic, one of the largest pedestrian ones. An equestrian Louis XIV stands in the middle and a Ferris wheel appears each winter.

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6. 

   6© YCrem's · CC BY-SA 3.0

   La Croix-Rousse

   A hill of two hundred and fifty-four metres and the quarter on it, built in the early nineteenth century for silk weavers — the flats have ceilings four metres high to take the Jacquard looms. The weavers rose in 1831 and again in 1834 and were shot down both times.

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   parc de la Tête d'Or

   A hundred and seventeen hectares laid out from 1857 on the Rhône, with a lake for rowing, a botanical garden with glasshouses of 1865 and a zoo — all of it free, which is a nineteenth-century municipal principle Lyon has kept.

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8. 

   8© User:Otourly · CC BY-SA 3.0

   amphitheater of Lyon

   An amphitheatre built for the federal assembly of sixty Gallic tribes, and where the first Christians of Lyon, including the slave girl Blandina, were killed in the persecution of 177. A memorial column stands in the arena.

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9. 

   9© Larry Claude · CC BY-SA 4.0

   La Part-Dieu

   A business district built from the 1960s on a former barracks, and after La Défense the second largest office quarter in France. The main station, the shopping centre and the concert hall are in it, along with the tower Lyonnais call the pencil.

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10. 

    10© Sebleouf · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Fourvière

    The hill immediately west of the old town, where the Roman city was founded in 43 BC. Convents, seminaries and the basilica crowd it, which is why Lyon calls this the hill that prays and Croix-Rousse opposite the hill that works.

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1. 

   1© Jean-Christophe BENOIST · CC BY 4.0

   ancient theatre of Lyon

   A Roman theatre built about 15 BC on the Fourvière hill, the oldest in France, seating some ten thousand after enlargement. It is used each summer for a festival of music and theatre, so the stone is sat on rather than looked at.

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2. 

   2© Fred Romero from Paris, France · CC BY 2.0

   Musée des Confluences

   A museum of 2014 at the point where the Rhône meets the Saône, in a Coop Himmelb(l)au building described by its architects as a crystal and a cloud. It puts natural history and ethnography together and asks what the collections were for.

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   3© Corentin Eustacchi · CC BY-SA 4.0

   place des Terreaux

   A square at the foot of Croix-Rousse with the town hall on one side and the fine arts museum on another, and Bartholdi's fountain of four horses in the corner — made for Bordeaux, which could not pay for it. Its ground was a marsh, which is what the name records.

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   4© Yann Caradec from Paris, France · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Metallic tower of Fourvière

   A steel tower of 1894 on the Fourvière hill that closely resembles the Eiffel Tower, built three years after it, and which carried a restaurant and a lift for twenty-two people. It is now a television mast and closed to the public, but it remains the highest point in Lyon.

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5. 

   5© Siren-Com · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Sanctuary of the Three Gauls

   The federal sanctuary Rome set up at the end of the first century BC, where delegates of sixty Gallic tribes met annually to conduct the imperial cult — the mechanism by which Gaul was administered as much as governed. Its altar is known from coins and inscriptions.

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   Lugdunum Musée et Théâtres

   The museum of Gallo-Roman civilisation in Lyon, formerly the Fourvière Gallo-Roman Museum. Bernard Zehrfuss designed it and it opened in 1975 on the Fourvière hill beside the Roman theatre and odeon, dug into the slope so that a spiral ramp branches into the galleries.

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   7© Chabe01 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Église Saint-Nizier

   A Gothic church on the peninsula, on the spot where tradition puts the meeting place of the first Christians of Lyon. Its two spires are deliberately unmatched, one stone and one openwork, and its Renaissance doorway is by Philibert Delorme.

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   8© Arnaud Fafournoux · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Aqueduct of the Gier

   A Roman aqueduct built around the first century to supply Lugdunum, now Lyon. It is the longest and best preserved of the four that served the city, drawing water from the source of the Gier on the flank of Mont Pilat, forty-two kilometres southwest.

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   9© Sebleouf · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Basilica of Saint-Martin d'Ainay

   A Romanesque church consecrated in 1107, the only one of its date left in central Lyon, built with columns taken from the Roman sanctuary of the Three Gauls. Its brick and stone banding and carved capitals are the oldest thing standing on the peninsula.

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    10© Kent Wang · CC BY 4.0

    Saint-Bonaventure Basilica

    A church on Place des Cordeliers on the Presqu'île in the 2nd arrondissement of Lyon. It is the only medieval building left standing when the Second Empire cut the Rue Impériale, now Rue de la République, through the quarter.

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