Lyon: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Lyon has a saying about itself: the hill that prays and the hill that works. Fourvière, to the west, is where the Romans founded Lugdunum in 43 BC and where the basilica now stands; Croix-Rousse, to the north, is where thirty thousand silk weavers lived and worked in flats built with four-metre ceilings to take the looms. Between them is the old city, and the whole five hundred hectares is a Unesco site — one of the largest historic areas on the list. This route is the praying hill and the old town below it. Three hours, and take the funicular up.
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A short history of Lyon
In 43 BC the Romans founded Lugdunum on the hill above the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône, and it became the capital of the provinces of Gaul. In 10 BC the Emperor Claudius was born here. In AD 177 many Christians were executed here, among them Saint Blandina. In the 16th century a silk industry developed in the city, and its weavers worked here for about two hundred years. In 1895 the Lumière brothers filmed here one of the first films in history, Workers Leaving the Factory. In the Second World War Lyon was a centre of the French Resistance. In 1998 its historic centre was declared a World Heritage Site.
The ten best sights in Lyon
1Notre-Dame de FourvièreFree, built on a vow made in 1870, and the terrace behind it is the city view
2Roman theatreFree, from 15 BC, and it is the oldest Roman theatre in France
3Lugdunum museumFrom 7 euros, buried in the hillside above the theatres, and closed Monday
4Saint-Jean CathedralFree, and the 14th-century astronomical clock still chimes at certain hours
5Hôtel de GadagneFrom 8 euros, two museums in a Renaissance house, and closed Monday and Tuesday
6Puppet museumIn the Gadagne ticket, and Guignol was invented in Lyon in 1808
7Musée des Beaux-ArtsFrom 8 euros, in a 17th-century abbey, and closed Tuesday
8Musée des ConfluencesFrom 9 euros, closed Monday, and the building is a deconstructed glass cloud
9Institut LumièreFrom 7 euros, in the Lumière family villa, and the first film was shot outside it
10Hangar du Premier-FilmPart of the Lumière site, and it is the wall the workers walked out of in 1895
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What is an audio walk?
Tours in Lyon →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Lyon:
Free walking tours in Lyon
Two hills: one prays, one works
Lyon has a saying about itself: the hill that prays and the hill that works. Fourvière, to the west, is where the Romans founded Lugdunum in 43 BC and where the basilica now stands; Croix-Rousse, to the north, is where thirty thousand silk weavers lived and worked in flats built with four-metre ceilings to take the looms. Between them is the old city, and the whole five hundred hectares is a Unesco site — one of the largest historic areas on the list. This route is the praying hill and the old town below it. Three hours, and take the funicular up.
- Notre-Dame de Fourvière · Built because of a deal: in 1870, with the Prussian army advancing, the archbishop vowed that if Lyon were spared he would build a church to the Virgin. The Prussians stopped short of the city and the basilica went up between 1872 and 1884, paid for by public subscription. Lyonnais call it the upside-down elephant, because the four towers look like legs in the air.
- Roman theatres of Fourvière · The large theatre was built around 15 BC and is the oldest Roman theatre in France. Lugdunum was the capital of Roman Gaul and the junction of its road network, which is why the emperors Claudius and Caracalla were born here. Both theatres are still used — the Nuits de Fourvière festival puts concerts in them every summer, and the stone seating is the original.
- Lugdunum museum · The building is buried in the hillside above the theatres, with only its windows showing, so that it does not compete with them — it was finished in 1975 and the architect was told the ruins came first. Inside is the Claudian Table: a bronze plaque engraved with a speech the emperor Claudius gave to the Roman senate in 48 AD, arguing that Gauls should be allowed to hold office.
- Saint-Jean Cathedral · Begun in 1180 and finished in 1476, so the choir is Romanesque and the facade Gothic. The thing to look for is the astronomical clock in the north transept: built in the fourteenth century and repaired many times, it shows the date, the moon, the position of the sun over Lyon and the ecclesiastical calendar — and it was calculated to run until 2019, at which point it was recalculated.
- Vieux Lyon · The largest Renaissance quarter in France, and it survives because in the nineteenth century the money moved to the peninsula and nobody bothered to rebuild here. In 1962 it was going to be cleared as a slum; the culture minister André Malraux made it France’s first protected sector instead, which is the law that saved the old quarters of a dozen French cities afterwards.
- The traboules · Covered passages that cut through the inside of buildings from one street to the next — there are around four hundred in Lyon, and they exist because the city is squeezed between two rivers and a hill, so the blocks are long and narrow. Silk workers used them to carry cloth without getting it wet, and the Resistance used them to move through the city and lose people following them.
Silk, and the hill that worked
By the nineteenth century about forty per cent of working Lyon was in silk, and the trade was concentrated on one hill. The weavers — canuts — were not factory hands: they owned their looms, worked at home and were paid by the piece, which is why the buildings on Croix-Rousse have ceilings four metres high and enormous windows. When the merchants cut the rates in 1831 the canuts took the city, and that uprising is usually counted as the first workers’ revolt of the industrial age. Two and a half hours, downhill the whole way if you start at the top.
- Maison des Canuts · Two working Jacquard looms are demonstrated here every hour, and the machine is the point: Joseph-Marie Jacquard, from Lyon, worked out in 1804 how to control a loom with punched cards, so a pattern could be stored and repeated by a machine instead of memorised by a person. That idea — instructions on cards — is the direct ancestor of the programmed computer, and Charles Babbage owned a Jacquard-woven portrait of him.
- Cour des Voraces · A courtyard in a canut building with an open concrete staircase six storeys high, built around 1840 — and the staircase is a traboule: it connects three different streets at three different levels, because the hill is that steep. The Voraces were a canut mutual society, and they used this building in the 1848 revolution. People live here now and the gate is sometimes shut.
- Mur des Canuts · Twelve hundred square metres of painted wall, the largest mural in Europe, first done in 1987 and repainted in 1997 and 2013 — each time the same street is shown but the people in it have aged, children have grown up and new buildings have appeared. So the mural is a record of its own thirty years, and the painters are a Lyon collective who have done about four hundred walls worldwide.
- Croix-Rousse market · The daily market runs along the boulevard that was built on the line of the old city wall — the hill was a separate commune until 1852, outside the customs barrier, which is exactly why the silk trade settled there: cheaper rent, no city tax on the thread coming in. The boulevard is the former frontier, and the market has been on it since.
- Amphitheatre of the Three Gauls · Built in 19 AD for the annual assembly of delegates from the sixty tribes of the three Gallic provinces, which met here to swear loyalty to Rome — so this is where Roman Gaul was politically held together. It is also where Christians were executed in 177, including a slave girl named Blandina, and the post in the middle of the arena marks that.
- Passage Thiaffait · A passage of 1828 with a double staircase, which had become derelict by the 1980s and was bought by the city and turned into subsidised workshops for young fashion designers — about twenty of them at a time, on three-year leases, which is a deliberate use of silk-city history as industrial policy. The workshops are open and you can walk in.
The peninsula, and where food got serious
Between the two rivers is the Presqu’île, the flat peninsula that became the modern centre — the squares, the opera, the museums and the restaurants. Lyon’s claim to be the food capital of France rests on two things: the bouchon, a small restaurant type that serves offal, pork and wine by the pot, and the mères lyonnaises, women who had cooked in bourgeois houses, lost those jobs after 1914 and opened their own places. Eugénie Brazier was the first person of either sex to hold three Michelin stars for two restaurants at once, in 1933. Three hours, flat.
- Place Bellecour · Sixty-two thousand square metres and deliberately empty — one of the largest open squares in Europe with nothing in it but a statue and two pavilions. It is bare because it was a parade ground and then a place where the city could be controlled: anything happening on it is visible from every side. The red sand surface is the original and is raked, not paved.
- Place des Terreaux · The fountain here, four horses dragging a chariot out of water, was made by Frédéric Bartholdi — the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty — and it was built for Bordeaux, which could not pay, so Lyon bought it in 1890. The square was also where the city’s guillotine stood during the Terror, and around two thousand people were executed on it.
- Musée des Beaux-Arts · Seventy rooms in a seventeenth-century Benedictine abbey, and it is the second-largest art collection in France after the Louvre. The abbey was closed in the revolution and the collection started from confiscated church property, which is how most French provincial museums began — the state took the paintings and had to put them somewhere.
- Les Halles Paul Bocuse · Forty-eight stalls under one roof, named after the chef who held three Michelin stars for fifty-five consecutive years — a record nobody else has approached. The thing to find is the cervelle de canut: not brains, despite the name, but fresh cheese beaten with herbs, shallots, vinegar and oil. The name means silk worker’s brains and it was an insult aimed at the canuts by the merchants.
- Grand Hôtel-Dieu · A hospital on this site from the twelfth century until 2010 — eight hundred years — and the dome over its central courtyard was built in the 1760s. Rabelais worked here as a doctor in the 1530s while publishing Pantagruel in Lyon. It reopened in 2018 as shops, a hotel and a courtyard anyone can walk through, and the surgical amphitheatre is still inside.
- Institut Lumière · On the twenty-second of March 1895 the Lumière brothers showed a forty-six second film of workers leaving their factory — the first film ever projected to an audience. The factory wall they walked out of still stands a hundred metres from the family villa, which is now the museum. The brothers were industrialists, not artists: they were the largest photographic plate manufacturer in Europe and thought cinema had no future.
Getting to Lyon and getting around
- Saint-Exupéry Airport · The Rhônexpress tram reaches Part-Dieu in 30 minutes for about 17 euros
- Part-Dieu station · Two hours to Paris, and the metro and trams all meet here
- Perrache station · The older station, at the south end of the peninsula, and buses leave from it
- Fourvière funicular · A metro ticket covers it, two minutes up the hill, and it runs from six
Cheap eats in Lyon
Lyon has its own restaurant category, the bouchon, and it is defined by what it serves rather than by price: pork, offal and the cheap cuts, with wine poured from a pot — a sixty-centilitre bottle with a thick glass base, which exists so that it cannot be knocked over and so that the measure is honest. The dishes are tablier de sapeur (breaded tripe), quenelle (a pike dumpling in sauce), andouillette, and cervelle de canut, which is cheese and not brains. A full plate is twenty to thirty euros. Many bouchons close at the weekend, which catches people out.
- Café des Fédérations · About 35 euros for the set menu, closed at the weekend
- Café Comptoir Abel · About 30 euros, closed Sunday, and book for the evening
- Daniel et Denise · About 35 euros, and the pâté en croûte here won the world championship
- Chez Paul · About 28 euros, a certified bouchon, and closed Sunday and Monday
- Les Lyonnais · About 30 euros, photographs of locals on every wall, and no booking at lunch
- Brasserie Georges · About 30 euros, open every day, and 600 seats means no queue
- Les Halles Paul Bocuse · Closed Monday, 48 stalls, and several have counters you eat at standing
- Pralus · About 20 euros a loaf, and go before noon on Saturday
Museums in Lyon
Lyon’s museums follow its industries: silk, printing, cinema and Roman administration. Two of them are world firsts rather than regional collections — the Lumière brothers projected the first film here in 1895, and the Jacquard loom in the silk museum is the direct ancestor of the punched-card computer. Most close on Monday or Tuesday, and the city card covers all of them plus the transport.
- Institut Lumière · From 7 euros, closed Monday, and the factory wall is outside
- Lugdunum museum · From 7 euros, closed Monday, and it is built into the hillside
- Musée des Beaux-Arts · From 8 euros, 70 rooms in a Benedictine abbey, and closed Tuesday
- Musée des Confluences · From 9 euros, closed Monday, and the point of the peninsula
- Maison des Canuts · From 8 euros, a Jacquard loom run on the hour, and closed Sunday
- Musée de l’Imprimerie · From 8 euros, closed Monday and Tuesday, and small
- Resistance and Deportation Centre · From 6 euros, closed Monday, and allow an hour and a half
- Hôtel de Gadagne · From 8 euros, the city museum and the puppet museum, and closed Monday and Tuesday
Nature and day trips near Lyon
Lyon sits where the Saône meets the Rhône, and the two rivers behave differently — the Saône is slow and green and comes from the north, the Rhône is fast and cold and comes from a glacier. That difference shaped the city: the old quarters are on the gentle Saône and the industry went to the Rhône. Both banks were car parks until the 2000s and are now continuous paths. Beyond the city the Beaujolais hills start forty kilometres north and the Alps are visible from Fourvière on a clear winter day.
- Parc de la Tête d’Or · Free, open from six in the morning, and the zoo is free too
- Berges du Rhône · Free, five kilometres taken back from car parks in 2007, and the barges are bars
- Jardin des Curiosités · Free, a small terrace with chairs on the Fourvière slope, and the best free view
- Jardin Rosa Mir · Free, Saturday afternoons April to October, and twenty people at a time
- Mont d’Or · 20 kilometres out, and the bus goes to Saint-Cyr
- Beaujolais · From 40 kilometres north, and the golden-stone villages are the quiet half
- Pérouges · 35 kilometres out, a walled village with no cars, and the galette is the local tart
- Parc des Oiseaux · From 22 euros, 60 kilometres out, and it sits in a region of a thousand ponds
Things to do in Lyon with kids
- Parc de la Tête d’Or · Free, a free zoo, boats on the lake, and a little train round it
- Puppet museum · From 8 euros, in the Gadagne, and there are live shows in Vieux Lyon
- Musée des Confluences · From 9 euros, a mammoth and dinosaurs, and under 18s are free
- Fourvière funicular · A metro ticket, two minutes, and it is a tunnel the whole way up
- Roman theatres · Free, stone steps to climb and no railings, and a lot of running room
- Berges du Rhône · Free, flat for prams and scooters, and there are playgrounds along it
- Parc des Oiseaux · From 22 euros, free flight shows twice a day, and a full day out
- Les Halles Paul Bocuse · Closed Monday, and the praline tarts are the thing children will accept
Live music in Lyon
Lyon’s two big events are both unusual. The Nuits de Fourvière puts theatre and concerts into two Roman theatres every summer for two months. And the Fête des Lumières, on the eighth of December, is a city-wide light festival that began as a vow in 1852 — every household put candles in its windows, and they still do, under the large installations. Both sell out and both are worth planning a trip around.
- Roman theatres in summer · From 25 euros, June to July, and bring something to sit on
- Opéra de Lyon · From 20 euros, and the top-floor rehearsal room is visible from the street
- Halle Tony Garnier · A 1914 iron hall, 17,000 standing, and this is where the big tours play
- Berges du Rhône barges · Free to walk up to, live music on several boats, and they run till two
- Place des Terreaux in December · Free, the Fête des Lumières runs four nights around 8 December
- Villa Gillet · Talks and literary festivals in a park villa, and the programme is in French
- Confluence · The clubs and the summer riverside bars, and the tram runs till midnight
- Grand Hôtel-Dieu · The courtyard bars and the dome, open late, and free to walk through
Nightlife in Lyon
Lyon drinks on the water: the Rhône bank between the two bridges is a line of moored barges that are bars, and in summer the whole embankment is full from nine. The student quarters are Guillotière and Jean Macé, the expensive end is the peninsula, and the old town is mostly tourists by eight. A glass of Beaujolais is four to six euros and a pot of wine with dinner is around twenty. Nothing closes before one and the metro runs to midnight, two at the weekend.
- Berges du Rhône · Free, the barge bars run from April to October, and no cover charge
- Croix-Rousse · The local end, cheaper, and the bars round Place Sathonay fill at nine
- Place Sathonay · Free, people sit on the steps with a bottle, and it is a quiet square otherwise
- Guillotière · The student quarter across the Rhône, cheap, and open late
- Vieux Lyon · Loud and touristy after eight, and the bouchons here are the expensive ones
- Confluence · The clubs and the cinema, and the tram is the way back
- Brasserie Georges · Open till midnight every day, 600 seats, and no booking needed
- Quai Saint-Antoine · Free, the Saône bank, quieter than the Rhône, and lit all night
Frequently asked questions about Lyon
What is there to see in Lyon?
The top sights in Lyon are Notre-Dame de Fourvière, Roman theatre and Lugdunum museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Lyon?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Lyon without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Lyon?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Lyon, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Two hills: one prays, one works.
How do you get to Lyon and get around?
The main ways are Saint-Exupéry Airport, Part-Dieu station and Perrache station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Lyon, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Lyon that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Lyon for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.