5 Days in Lyon

From the Vieux Lyon metro station, the F2 funicular climbs straight up to Fourvière, the "hill that prays". The white basilica on top was a promise: in October 1870, with the Prussian army advancing, the people of Lyon vowed to build a church to the Virgin if the city was spared. It was, and work started in 1872. Pierre Bossan's design mixes Byzantine and Gothic, and the inside is covered in gold mosaics telling the story of Mary and of France. Locals call it, not quite fondly, "the upside-down elephant".

Next to it, on the old chapel's bell tower, stands a golden statue of the Virgin. Its inauguration was set for September 1852, postponed by floods to 8 December, and on the day the weather was bad again, the sky cleared at the last minute, and the people of Lyon put candles in their windows. They've done it every year since, and that's the origin of the Fête des Lumières.

Walk out onto the esplanade for the view: the red roofs of the old town, the two rivers, the towers of Part-Dieu and, on a clear day, Mont Blanc on the horizon. The metal tower next door, a mini Eiffel Tower from 1894, is a TV mast.

Five minutes' walk down the hill are two Roman theaters cut into the slope. Lugdunum was founded in 43 BC and became the capital of the Three Gauls, the Roman provinces that covered most of modern France. The large theater was built around 15 BC and later enlarged to hold some 10,000 people, and the smaller odeon next to it was for music and readings. They're free, open all day, and still used: every summer the Nuits de Fourvière festival puts concerts and plays on the old stage.

Built into the hillside beside them is the Lugdunum museum, a concrete building from 1975 that you walk down through like a ramp. Its star is the Claudian Table, a bronze plate engraved with the speech in which Emperor Claudius, who was born here in 10 BC, asked the Senate in 48 AD to let men from Gaul become senators. There's also a huge mosaic of chariot races at the circus.

Walk down the Montée du Gourguillon, a steep medieval lane that was once the main road up the hill, to the Cathédrale Saint-Jean at the bottom. It took three hundred years to build, from 1175 to 1480, which is why it's Romanesque at the back and Gothic at the front, and its archbishop still carries the honorary title of Primate of the Gauls.

Inside, find the astronomical clock in the north transept, first mentioned in the late 14th century. At noon, 2pm, 3pm and 4pm its little figures come to life: a rooster crows, angels ring bells and the Annunciation is acted out. Have lunch first in Saint-Georges or Saint-Paul, at either end of the old town, and aim for the 2pm or 3pm show, a few minutes early.

Vieux Lyon is one of the largest Renaissance quarters in Europe, built when Lyon was a city of bankers, printers and Italian merchants in the 15th and 16th centuries, and in 1998 it became the heart of a UNESCO site. Its secret is the traboules, passages that cut through the buildings from one street to the next, across courtyards and up spiral staircases. Lyon has about 500 of them, around 40 open to the public. They were shortcuts down to the river and the wells, the silk workers of the Croix-Rousse used theirs to carry cloth out of the rain, and in World War II the Resistance used them to slip away from the Germans.

Push the door at 54 rue Saint-Jean and follow the Longue Traboule through four courtyards to 27 rue du Bœuf. Then find the Tour Rose at 16 rue du Bœuf, a pink Renaissance stair tower in a courtyard, and wander along rue Saint-Jean, rue du Bœuf and rue Juiverie, looking for open doors.

In a huge Renaissance mansion at the north end of the old town are the Musées Gadagne, two museums in one: the history of Lyon, and puppets from around the world. The puppet museum is the place to meet Guignol, a puppet created around 1808 by Laurent Mourguet, an unemployed silk worker who turned dentist and then puppeteer. Guignol is a cheeky Lyon canut, a silk weaver, who mocks the rich and the police in the local dialect, and he's still on stage in the city today.

The history rooms are a good way to make sense of everything you've walked through, and the garden café on the top floor is one of the nicest hidden terraces in town.

Before dinner, walk down to the Saône and cross one of the footbridges, the red Passerelle Saint-Georges or the Passerelle du Palais de Justice. From the Presqu'île side you see the old town at its best, a row of tall pastel houses along the river with the cathedral and Fourvière lit up above them. It's the classic view of Lyon, and it's even better after dark.

A bouchon is a small, family-style Lyon restaurant, usually with checked tablecloths, a short menu written on a board and a lot of pork. The name may come from the bunches of straw that old inns hung outside, and the food is the cooking of the silk workers and the mères: quenelles, saucisson, andouillette and cervelle de canut (see What to Eat and Drink). Order the menu, a pot of Beaujolais, and don't plan anything for afterwards.

The word "bouchon" isn't protected, and many places on rue Saint-Jean and rue Mercière use it to sell mediocre food to tourists. Look for the "Les Bouchons Lyonnais" sticker, an association of the real ones. In the old town, Daniel et Denise Saint-Jean, run by the chef Joseph Viola, is one of the best.

The Croix-Rousse is the "hill that works", as opposed to Fourvière, the hill that prays. Its plateau feels like a village, and the market along the Boulevard de la Croix-Rousse is where it does its shopping, with around 95 stalls on its big days. Buy a coffee, a slice of tarte aux pralines or a bugne, and some Saint-Marcellin cheese and rosette sausage for later, and do as the locals do.

Ten minutes north, on the corner of Boulevard des Canuts, is the Mur des Canuts, one of the largest trompe-l'œil paintings in Europe. It covers 1,200 m² of a blank wall with a whole fake street of the neighborhood: staircases, shops, a market, people on balconies. It was first painted in 1987 by the CitéCréation collective and repainted in 1997 and 2013, so the characters have aged and the street has changed with the city. Lyon has dozens of these murals, and you'll see another, the Fresque des Lyonnais, on the Saône later.

The canuts were Lyon's silk weavers, and in the 19th century tens of thousands of them worked here, in tall buildings with huge windows and high ceilings made to fit the Jacquard loom. That machine, invented around 1801 by Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a Lyon weaver's son, used punched cards to weave patterns, and it's often called an ancestor of the computer.

The silk workers lived hard and were paid little, and in 1831 and again in 1834 they rose up, under the slogan "live working or die fighting". These were among the first workers' revolts of the industrial age, and both were crushed by the army. At the Maison des Canuts, a guide tells that story and weaves on a working Jacquard loom in front of you, which explains more than any book.

Walk to the Gros Caillou, a huge glacial boulder at the eastern end of the plateau with a view over the Rhône, then start down the Pentes, the slopes. The most famous traboule in the city is the Cour des Voraces at 9 Place Colbert, a courtyard with a monumental open staircase, named after the Voraces, a canut society that took part in the uprisings of 1848. From there, take the Montée de la Grande Côte, a long stepped street with a view all the way down.

Near the bottom, look for the ruins of the Amphitheater of the Three Gauls, built in 19 AD, where Christians including Saint Blandina were martyred in 177. The Pentes are full of small galleries, bars and street art, and they're one of the most lived-in parts of the city.

At the bottom of the slopes, on rue du Major Martin, is the Café des Fédérations, one of the most famous bouchons in Lyon, open since 1872. There's no menu to choose from: you sit down, and the starters arrive in bowls for the table, lentils, sausage, grattons (fried pork crackling), then you pick a main course, cheese and dessert. It's loud, fun and very Lyon.

Other good bouchons nearby are Le Bouchon des Filles and Chez Hugon, a classic since the 1930s that opens on weekdays only.

Two minutes away is the Place des Terreaux, with the 17th-century Hôtel de Ville on one side and, in the middle, the Bartholdi fountain: the sea goddess Amphitrite in a chariot pulled by four wild horses, rivers rushing to the ocean. It's by Auguste Bartholdi, who later made the Statue of Liberty, and it was meant for Bordeaux. Bordeaux couldn't pay for it, so Lyon bought it in 1890 and put it up here in 1892.

On the south side of the square, a 17th-century Benedictine abbey holds the Musée des Beaux-Arts, one of the best art museums in France outside Paris, with Egyptian antiquities, Rembrandt, Rubens and a strong run of French painting through to Monet, Gauguin and Picasso. Even if you skip the collection, sit for a while in the old cloister garden, which is free and the quietest place in the center.

Behind the Hôtel de Ville is the Opéra, a 19th-century theater on which Jean Nouvel put a huge black glass half-barrel vault in 1993. At the top of it, Les Muses is a bar with a view across the rooftops to Fourvière. Go up for a drink at sunset, then wander down to the Saône to see the Fresque des Lyonnais, a painted building on the Quai Saint-Vincent with famous Lyonnais at its windows, from the Lumière brothers and Paul Bocuse to the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

A modern hall near Part-Dieu station doesn't look like much from outside, but Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse is the city's temple of food, named after its most famous chef in 2006. Inside, around fifty merchants sell the best of everything: Sibilia's sausages and rosette, Saint-Marcellin cheese ripened to the point of running at La Mère Richard, pike quenelles, pralines, chocolates and cakes.

Do what Lyonnais do at the weekend and have oysters and a glass of white wine at one of the counters, even if it's 10am. Then fill a bag for a picnic: bread, a saucisson, cheese, some fruit and a bottle.

Take bus C1 or walk 25 minutes north to the Parc de la Tête d'Or, opened in 1857 and at 117 hectares one of the largest city parks in France. Its name, the "golden head", comes from a legend of a treasure, a golden head of Christ, buried somewhere in the grounds. Nobody has ever found it.

It has a lake with boats, a rose garden, a free zoo, and huge 19th-century glasshouses. Find a spot on the grass for your picnic from the Halles. On weekends half the city is here, running, cycling or doing nothing much.

Take the metro D to Monplaisir-Lumière, where Antoine Lumière had a factory making photographic plates. His sons Auguste and Louis, born in Besançon, built the Cinématographe, a camera and projector in one, and on 19 March 1895 they filmed their workers walking out of the factory gates. La Sortie de l'usine Lumière is one of the first films ever made. Their first paid public screening was later that year, on 28 December, at a café in Paris.

The family's lavish villa, built in 1899-1902, is now the Musée Lumière, with the original machines and the early films. Across the garden, the Hangar du Premier-Film stands on the site of the factory gate in that film, and today it's a cinema. They weren't the only inventors of film, Edison was working on it too, but they were the ones who put it on a screen for an audience.

Lyon was the capital of the French Resistance, and its darkest story is told at the Centre d'Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation (CHRD), a short tram ride west on Avenue Berthelot. The building was a military medical school taken over by the Gestapo in 1943-44, where Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon", had prisoners tortured in the cellars.

The best-known of them was Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's envoy, who had united the Resistance movements. He was arrested in a doctor's house in Caluire on 21 June 1943, interrogated by Barbie and died on the train to Germany that July. Barbie escaped to Bolivia after the war, was brought back in 1983 and tried in Lyon in 1987 for crimes against humanity, including the deportation of 44 Jewish children from a home in Izieu. The museum tells all of it plainly and well.

End the day on the Berges du Rhône, the wide riverside promenade on the left bank, which was a parking lot until 2007. On summer evenings it fills with people on the grass and the steps, and the péniches, barges turned into bars and clubs, are moored along the Quai Victor Augagneur. They come and go with the seasons, so walk along and pick whichever looks busiest.

For dinner, cross into the Guillotière, just south, the city's most mixed neighborhood. Skip the Place Gabriel-Péri itself, which is rough late at night, and head for the streets south of it, full of North African, Vietnamese, Armenian and West African restaurants. It's also where Lyon's craft beer scene started: Ninkasi, founded in 1997, was one of the first craft breweries in France.

The south of Beaujolais is called the land of the Pierres Dorées, the "golden stones", after the warm yellow limestone that its villages are built from. They glow in the morning light, and Oingt is the most beautiful of them, a medieval village on a hilltop ranked among the "most beautiful villages of France".

Walk up through its lanes to the church and the old tower for a view across the vines to the Monts du Lyonnais, then drive on through the neighboring villages. Many have castles, and most have a wine cellar with a sign out for tastings (dégustation).

Drive 45 minutes north into the hills of the ten crus, the villages whose wines are good enough to carry their own name: Saint-Amour, Juliénas, Chénas, Moulin-à-Vent, Fleurie, Chiroubles, Morgon, Régnié, Brouilly and Côte de Brouilly. All are made from Gamay, a grape that gives light, juicy reds. Forget the cheap Beaujolais Nouveau of the 1980s: a good Morgon or Moulin-à-Vent can age for years.

Stop for lunch in Fleurie or Villié-Morgon, at a village restaurant with a lunch menu and a glass of the local cru, the way the winemakers eat.

Above Fleurie, on top of a hill covered in vines, stands the little Chapelle de la Madone, built in the 19th century. The chapel itself is simple, and the reason to come is the view: the whole of northern Beaujolais in rows of vines, the Saône valley and, on a clear day, the Alps.

A few minutes east is the old windmill that gave the Moulin-à-Vent cru its name, standing alone among the vines. The wine made around it is the most powerful of the ten crus, the one locals keep for special dinners.

Finish with a tasting at one of the family estates around it, or at the Hameau Dubœuf in Romanèche-Thorins, a big wine museum created by Georges Dubœuf, the merchant who turned Beaujolais Nouveau into a worldwide event. It's touristy, but well done.

Back in the city, end the day the way Lyon has for centuries, with a pot lyonnais: a 46 cl glass bottle with a thick base, filled with Beaujolais or Côtes du Rhône and put on the table at every bouchon and wine bar in town. People say that Lyon is watered by three rivers, the Rhône, the Saône and the Beaujolais, and after today you'll know why. The wine bars around the Place du Change and the Presqu'île are the place for it.

Place Bellecour is a huge, open square of red gravel, about 6 hectares, one of the largest open squares in Europe. In the middle, Louis XIV rides a horse, a statue put up in 1825 to replace one smashed in the Revolution, when the square's grand facades were torn down too. After the 1793 siege, the Convention decreed that "Lyon is no more" and renamed the city "Liberated Town". It didn't last.

The statue is also Lyon's favorite meeting point: locals arrange to meet sous la queue du cheval, "under the horse's tail". Two blocks west, on the Saône quay, the Saint-Antoine market is where the Presqu'île does its shopping every morning except Monday.

Three minutes east of Bellecour is the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, the city's hospital for more than 800 years, whose long facade along the Rhône was designed by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, the architect of the Panthéon in Paris. The hospital moved out in 2010, and after a long restoration its courtyards, gardens and arcades are now shops, cafés and a luxury hotel. Walk through them freely, then come back across the Presqu'île.

South of Bellecour, pick up a slice of tarte aux pralines, the bright pink tart of almonds coated in red sugar that's Lyon's favorite dessert, or a pink praline brioche from Pralus on rue de la Charité.

Then walk two blocks west to the Basilique Saint-Martin d'Ainay, one of the oldest churches in the city and its only fully Romanesque one, consecrated by Pope Paschal II in 1107. It was part of an abbey, and it's dark, low and calm, with four granite columns holding up the crossing, made by cutting in half two columns from the Roman altar of the sanctuary of the Three Gauls.

Take tram T1 south to the end of the Presqu'île, where the Saône flows into the Rhône. Here, on land that was rail yards and docks until twenty years ago, stands the Musée des Confluences, a crystal-and-steel cloud by the Austrian architects Coop Himmelb(l)au, opened in 2014. It's a museum of science and societies: dinosaurs, meteorites, Egyptian mummies, Japanese armor and Inuit tools, mixed together to ask big questions about where we come from.

Walk to the very tip of the garden behind it, where the two rivers meet, the green Rhône and the browner Saône side by side. Then walk north along the Saône docks past La Sucrière, an old sugar warehouse turned arts venue, and the Orange Cube, a bright orange office block with a hole punched in it, the symbols of the new Confluence district.

For the last night, go big. Walk north along the Saône docks from Confluence, and you reach Brasserie Georges, next to Perrache station, has been open since 1836, and its huge Art Deco dining room seats hundreds under a painted ceiling, with waiters rushing between tables and beer brewed for the house. Go for the room more than the food: order a choucroute or a quenelle and enjoy the show.

If you'd rather eat Bocuse, the late chef's four brasseries, Le Nord, Le Sud, L'Est and L'Ouest, serve his classics at a fraction of the price of his restaurant (see If You Have More Time).