Explorer Lyon

The Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon occupies the Palais Saint-Pierre, a former 17th-century Benedictine convent on Place des Terreaux whose cloister is now a sculpture garden. Its 70 rooms cover Egyptian and Mediterranean antiquities, decorative arts, coins and medals, sculpture and European painting, with works by Veronese, Rubens, Rembrandt, Monet and Picasso.

Lyon Cathedral, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, is the seat of the Archbishop of Lyon and stands on Place Saint-Jean in Old Lyon. Built between 1175 and 1480, it combines Romanesque and Gothic forms; inside are medieval stained-glass windows and a 14th-century astronomical clock whose automata still move several times a day.

The Grand Hôtel-Dieu is Lyon's former main hospital on the bank of the Rhône, founded in the 12th century, where François Rabelais was a physician in the 1530s. Its long riverside façade and dome were built to plans by Jacques-Germain Soufflot from 1741. After the hospital closed in 2010, the building reopened in 2019 with public courtyards, shops, restaurants and a hotel.

The Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière stands on Fourvière hill above Old Lyon and was built with private funds between 1872 and 1896 to designs by Pierre Bossan and Louis Sainte-Marie Perrin. It consists of two churches, one above the other; the upper church is decorated with mosaics, marble and stained glass, and the esplanade beside it overlooks the city.

Place Bellecour is a large open square at the heart of Lyon's Presqu'île, about 312 by 200 metres, laid out as a public square from the early 17th century. At its centre stands an equestrian statue of Louis XIV by François-Frédéric Lemot (1825), with a monument to Saint-Exupéry and the Little Prince at the west end and views up to Fourvière hill.

Lugdunum – Museum and Roman Theatres is Lyon's museum of Gallo-Roman history, set into Fourvière hill beside the Roman theatres and opened in 1975 in a concrete building by Bernard Zehrfuss. A spiral ramp leads past mosaics, inscriptions, statues and everyday objects, among them the Claudian Tablet, a bronze record of a speech Emperor Claudius gave in Rome in AD 48.

The Ancient Theatre of Fourvière is a Roman theatre built into Fourvière hill around 15 BC, near the centre of the Roman city of Lugdunum. Enlarged in the early 2nd century to a diameter of 108 metres and about 10,000 seats, it was excavated and partly rebuilt from 1933 and hosts the Nuits de Fourvière festival each year. The smaller Odeon stands beside it.

The Parc de la Tête d'Or is an urban park of about 105 hectares on the banks of the Rhône in Lyon's 6th arrondissement, laid out from 1857 by the Swiss landscape designers Denis and Eugène Bühler. Around its 16-hectare lake are the city's botanical garden with large glasshouses, a rose garden and a zoo with an African plain.

The Musée des Confluences is a museum of natural sciences and anthropology at the tip of Lyon's Presqu'île, where the Rhône and the Saône meet. Opened in 2014 in a steel-and-glass building by Coop Himmelb(l)au, it draws on collections built up over five centuries, from fossils and minerals to objects from cultures around the world.