🇫🇷 France · East and Central
Lyon is one of those cities the French adore and that many travellers discover late, almost by surprise. France's third city, undisputed food capital and a city with two thousand years of history, it spreads out between two rivers —the Rhône and the Saône— and two hills, with a historic centre that runs from the red Renaissance rooftops of the Vieux Lyon to the silk workshops of the Croix-Rousse. All of it recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Here the Romans founded Lugdunum, capital of the Gauls; here, in the Renaissance, the silk that dressed the courts of Europe was woven; and here, in the narrow secret passages called traboules, the French Resistance hid during the Nazi occupation. But Lyon is, above all, a feast for the palate: the city of Paul Bocuse and of the bouchons, those traditional taverns serving quenelles, andouillette and tablier de sapeur, washed down with wines from the Beaujolais and the Rhône.
This guide covers the essentials of Lyon with a practical, warm eye: how to climb up to Fourvière and see the city at your feet, how to get lost in the traboules of the Vieux Lyon, where to eat in an authentic bouchon, when the magical Fête des Lumières arrives and how to get around by metro and funicular. Less overwhelming than Paris and full of a life of its own, Lyon offers one of the great pleasures of a trip through France: a city to be enjoyed slowly and hungry.
Lyon was born in 43 BC, when the Roman consul Lucius Munatius Plancus founded the colony of Lugdunum on the Fourvière hill, at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. Lugdunum became the capital of the Gauls, with an amphitheatre, aqueducts and temples, and the birthplace of emperors such as Claudius. In the Renaissance, thanks to its fairs and its silk industry, Lyon became one of the richest cities in Europe. In the 19th century, the canuts (the silk workers) led some of the first great workers' revolts in history, in 1831 and 1834. During the Second World War, Lyon was the capital of the French Resistance —its traboules were used to escape the Gestapo— but also the base of the fearsome Klaus Barbie, the 'butcher of Lyon'. Today it is France's third city, a food capital and a World Heritage Site. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The France of the Rhine and the Rhône: Strasbourg and Alsace-Lorraine, fought over by France and Germany across three wars and today a capital of Europe; and Lyon, ancient Roman Lugdunum, city of silk, of the Resistance and of food.
Read the history of East and Central →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Lyon begins on a hill and at the meeting of two rivers. In 43 BC, shortly after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Roman consul and governor Lucius Munatius Plancus founded a colony of veterans on top of the Fourvière hill, beside the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. He called it Lugdunum, a name of Celtic root usually translated as 'the hill of the god Lug' (a Gaulish deity) or, on other readings, 'the hill of light' or 'of the ravens'. The site, at the crossing of the great river routes and of the roads Agrippa laid out across Gaul, could not have been better.
Lugdunum grew quickly until it became the capital of Roman Gaul (the 'Capital of the Three Gauls'), seat of the governor and annual meeting point for the representatives of the Gaulish peoples around the federal altar of the sanctuary of the Three Gauls. The city had an amphitheatre, theatres, an odeon, baths, forums and several aqueducts, and came to house tens of thousands of inhabitants. It was a first-rank imperial mint, where coin was struck for the whole Empire.
Notable figures came out of Lugdunum: the future emperor Claudius was born there in 10 BC, and his famous speech before the Roman Senate —in which he argued for granting citizenship and access to the Senate to Gaulish notables— survives engraved on the 'Claudian Table', today in the Lugdunum museum. The city was also one of the first centres of Christianity in Gaul: in the year 177 it suffered a very harsh persecution in which the so-called martyrs of Lyon died, among them the young slave Blandina, and shortly afterwards its bishop Irenaeus became one of the great theologians of the early Church. The magnificent Roman theatres of Fourvière and the Lugdunum museum still tell that two-thousand-year-old story today.
After the fall of Rome and a few dark centuries, Lyon re-emerged in the late Middle Ages as a commercial and religious centre. Its great take-off came in the 15th century, when the kings of France granted it the privilege of holding four great annual fairs, free of duties. Merchants and bankers from all over Europe came to them, above all Italians (Florentines, Lucchese, Genoese), who set up trading and banking houses in the city. Lyon thus became one of the financial capitals of the continent, the birthplace of innovations such as the bill of exchange and trade on credit.
That dynamism turned it into a great centre of the French Renaissance. With the fairs came printing, very early: Lyon was, after Paris, the second city in France to print books, and through the 16th century it became one of the biggest publishing centres in Europe, with hundreds of workshops. The printer and scholar Sébastien Gryphe worked there, among others, and François Rabelais published several of his works in Lyon. The city filled with Renaissance palaces, whose ensemble —today's Vieux Lyon— is now one of the best preserved Renaissance quarters in Europe.
Out of those fairs also came the industry that would mark Lyon forever: silk. In 1466, King Louis XI decided to establish silk weaving in the city so as to stop depending on Italian imports, and in 1536 Francis I granted it the silk monopoly in France. The Lyon 'Fabrique' grew steadily through the 17th and 18th centuries: Lyon silk dressed the court of Versailles and half of Europe, and by the end of the 18th century tens of thousands of people lived off the looms. The city had found the trade that would define its identity, its prosperity and, soon, its conflicts.
In the 19th century, silk was still the heart of Lyon, but the trade had changed. The invention of Joseph Marie Jacquard's loom, around 1801-1804, revolutionised weaving: through a system of punched cards —a distant forerunner of computing— it made it possible to weave the most complex designs automatically. The new looms were very tall, so the workshops moved to the Croix-Rousse hill, where buildings with enormous ceilings and large windows were built to give light to the machines. There the canuts, the silk weavers, lived and worked in very hard conditions.
The canuts worked piecework for the 'négociants' (the merchants who commissioned the fabric and set the prices), and their fortunes depended entirely on those rates. When an economic crisis sank the price of silk in 1831 and the merchants refused to respect an agreed minimum rate, rebellion broke out. On 21 November 1831, thousands of canuts rose up under a black flag with the motto 'Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant' ('Live working or die fighting'). They took the city after two days of fighting that left hundreds dead, and they controlled Lyon before the army restored order. A second, even more political uprising took place in 1834.
The canut revolts were harshly put down, but they went down in history as some of the first great workers' insurrections of the industrial age, and they are considered a landmark in the history of the labour movement and of social struggle. The black flag they raised would later be adopted as an anarchist symbol. The memory of the canuts is still very much alive in Lyon: in the Croix-Rousse quarter, in the traboules they used to carry the silk, in the Maison des Canuts and in the giant Mur des Canuts mural. And out of that working-class culture and the need to feed workers well and cheaply came the bouchons, the taverns that are today the city's culinary emblem.
The 20th century brought Lyon its darkest hours and also some of its most dignified. During the Second World War, after the German occupation of 1942, the city became one of the main centres of the French Resistance, to the point of being called 'the capital of the Resistance'. Its geography helped: the traboules, those secret passages cutting through the buildings of the Vieux Lyon and the Croix-Rousse, let resistance members move around the city, distribute clandestine newspapers and escape Gestapo raids. Underground newspapers were printed in Lyon and numerous networks operated there; Jean Moulin, the great unifier of the Resistance sent by de Gaulle, worked there.
But Lyon was also the seat of terror. At the head of the local Gestapo was Klaus Barbie, an SS officer who earned the nickname 'the butcher of Lyon' for his cruelty. Barbie was responsible for the torture and death of thousands of people, for the deportation of Jews —including the children of the Izieu home, sent to Auschwitz in 1944— and for the capture, torture and death of Jean Moulin in 1943. His name is forever tied to the worst crimes of the occupation.
The story had an epilogue decades later. After the war, Barbie managed to flee to South America, where he lived for many years in Bolivia under a false identity, protected by regimes and, as later became known, used by intelligence services. He was finally tracked down, extradited to France in 1983 and tried in Lyon in 1987 for crimes against humanity: he was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison in 1991. His trial, one of the first of its kind in France, had an enormous impact and helped fix the memory of the Holocaust and of the occupation. Today, the Centre of the History of Resistance and Deportation (CHRD), housed in the former building where Barbie had his headquarters, keeps that memory alive.
Post-war Lyon gradually left the silk industry behind —today almost a craft— and reinvented itself as a large modern metropolis, France's third city and the economic engine of the southeast, with a significant weight in pharmaceuticals, banking, chemicals and services. Whole districts were transformed: the old industrial district of Confluence, at the southern tip where the two rivers meet, is today a modern quarter of avant-garde architecture crowned by the spectacular Musée des Confluences, opened in 2014.
In 1998, Unesco recognised the exceptional value of Lyon's historic ensemble —from the Roman remains of Fourvière to the Renaissance Vieux Lyon, from the Presqu'île to the canuts' hill in the Croix-Rousse— and declared it a World Heritage Site, underlining how the city illustrates more than two thousand years of urban continuity. It is one of the largest protected historic ensembles in Europe.
But if anything defines today's Lyon it is its reputation as a food capital. The city inherited the tradition of the 'mères lyonnaises', the women cooks who in the 19th and 20th centuries raised home cooking to an art, and above all the figure of Paul Bocuse (1926-2018), the most famous chef of the 20th century, with three Michelin stars for more than fifty years and a true ambassador of French cooking around the world. His name is given to the city's great covered market and to a prestigious world cooking competition. Between the bouchons with their humble recipes and the fine dining restaurants, Lyon proudly claims its title of 'world capital of gastronomy'. And every December, around the 8th, the city celebrates its most luminous tradition: the Fête des Lumières, a festival with 19th-century religious roots that today turns streets, squares and monuments into a giant light show drawing millions of visitors over four nights.