A visit to Lyons

View over Lyons

On our way back from our last visit to the Cantal, we visited Lyons as although we have sped through it on the autoroute in the past, we have never actually stayed there. So we booked an hotel in the centre of the city, near the Place Bellcoeur, which was comfortable and easy to to walk to some of the places we were interested in seeing on a quick visit. Although the weather was mixed, we had enough dry spells to making walking round the city pleasant enough.

A street in old Lyon

Fourviere Basilica

We walked up to the Fourviére basilica on Saturday morning, while it was still fairly cool, and met many joggers running up and down the steep, narrow passages that thread their way through this part of the old city. We didn't manage to follow any of the famous traboules routes, but got a feel for those places on our way up and down. We made our way down and wandered towards the Opera, a magnificent mix of classical and very modern extension on top. By lunchtime it was raining so we found a small bouchon, for lunch, and following that walked to the Musée des Tissus, which houses a collection of beautiful examples of Lyons famous silks, many intended to decorate royal palaces, while the adjoining Musée des Arts Decorative contains many room sets, showing beautiful examples of how the Lyonnaise of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries lived and entertained each other. 

We returned to the same bouchon , Aux 3 Cochons, we had lunch in, for dinner that evening, as it was a fairly short walk from our hotel and was very welcoming, and the food was fairly typical lyonnaise, hearty and very tasty, welcome on a cool damp evening. We left with a small book of their recipes, in English.

 After dinner we walked across to the Rhone side of the city and followed the river for a while , passing a beautiful open-air swimming pool on the riverside, and admiring the lit -up upper old part of the city we had explored in the morning.

 We really enjoyed our brief stay in Lyons and would thoroughly recommend it as an interesting city to visit.