Things to do in Lyon: the food-obsessed French city
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Lyon, gastronomic epicentre of France, and thus the universe, is built on two round hills that stand like salt-and-pepper pots on the vine-green topographic tablecloth of the Rhône valley. You can get a great overview of the city by heading to the breezy peak of Fourvière. Hike up the winding road or take the easy route, a two-minute ride on the funicular. From the high terrace beside the Basilique Notre-Dame you can see all Lyon at a glance: the roofs of the Old Town spilling down the slope in front of you; the two broad rivers, the Saône and the Rhône, running parallel through the town centre like staves on a musical score; the modern faubourg away to the east, its skyscrapers an ensemble of wedges, cylinders and pencil points like a steel-and-glass desk-tidy. Give yourself a few minutes to take in the possibilities of the city as if you were perusing a menu – which is something you will be doing at regular intervals during your stay.
By way of an amuse-bouche, take a look around the basilica behind you. Its high location and gleaming white, faux-Byzantine exterior bring to mind Paris and Montmartre’s Sacré-Cœur (an association reinforced by the nearby Tour Métallique, a stumpy copy of the Eiffel Tower). Inside, the church is a staggering sight: walls covered with monumental golden mosaics and a fabulous filigreed gallimaufry of a ceiling, all cherubim and flowerheads and turtledoves and curlicues.
Not far from the church is the other grand sight of Fourvière: two ancient amphitheatres, side by side on the hillside, in the heart of what was the Roman stronghold of Lugdunum. These semi-circular theatres have been here for 2,000 years but were unearthed less than a century ago. The entire hill, in fact, is stuffed like a plum duff with Roman relics large and small, from rusting arrowheads to headless statues of gods and Caesars. All this booty is displayed in the museum, beside the remains of the sibling coliseums (now, pleasingly, live-entertainment venues once again).
It’ll be getting on for lunchtime by the time you come back down. The highest concentration of bouchons – local restaurants serving traditional lyonnais dishes – is on rue St Jean in Vieux Lyon, the medieval part of town on the left bank of the river Saône. But it is worth going off piste to find other kinds of restaurants in different areas. A short walk from St Jean is Daniel et Denise, still very typical but chic rather than rustic. Then there is Les Loges, a brilliant Michelin-starred restaurant concealed within the courtyard of the best hotel in Lyon, Cour des Loges, where the speciality is breaded pigeon. Or wander onto the Presqu’île, the long tongue of land between the two rivers, to find Le Sud. This lovely brasserie is part of the fiefdom of the late Paul Bocuse, high priest of Lyon’s food cult. Have a glass of Côte de Rhône; you are, after all, looking at the côte of the Rhône.
Another way to get a slice of Bocuse (if you decide against visiting triple-Michelin-starred L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges outside town) is to visit Les Halles, the amazing indoor market that bears the chef’s name. Everything inside this shining temple of gastronomy is beautiful, edible and presented to the very best advantage. There are traiteurs selling sausage with the surprising name of Jésus sec alongside half-lobsters bisected with a precision that would draw a gasp from Damien Hirst. In the patisseries – each more wonderful than the last – you will find flawlessly crimped quiches, pies with pitched pastry roofs and macarons in every pastel shade known to man. In between the stalls are lots of little coffee bars and bijou bistros where you can sit down and sample the delicious goods.
But even in Lyon it’s good to occasionally stop thinking about where the next meal is coming from, or at least spend some time walking off the previous one. It is possible, for example, to devote a happy afternoon to exploring the traboules – Lyon is riddled with these covered alleyways. They are like architectural worm-holes that pass through buildings, open onto poky inner courtyards, climb up or down sets of stone steps before emerging into a street some way away from where you started. Many of the heavy doors at pavement level are not an entrance to buildings, but the sealed end of a traboule. You can’t know until you try a door and, if it happens to be unlocked, peek behind it. Taken together, the traboules form a kind of city-wide lymphatic system, an invisible network that replicates the normal urban arteries without duplicating them. But what are they for? No one knows for sure. The usual explanation is that they were created to allow silk-workers to move their precious product around the city without it being exposed to the rain and filth of the open streets. What is certain is that they came in handy when the Nazis occupied Lyon in World War II. Resistance fighters could disappear from view like conjurors’ rabbits, then pop up where no German stormtrooper expected an enemy to be.
There is more to Lyon than past glories or a glorious repast. One of the reasons for visiting now is that it is currently one of the continent’s most lively, forward-looking cities. A vibrant arts quarter has sprung up in La Croix-Rousse, which is the part of town on the other hill. It used to be the weavers’ quarter (there was a saying: Lyon has one hill that prays and one that works), and it still has a slightly edgy, proletarian feel to it. But there are new little shops selling eccentric fashion and handcrafted lighting and vintage guitars. The centrepiece of the reimagined La Croix-Rousse is the Village des Créateurs, a 19th-century passage with tiny ateliers and boutiques occupied by an artisanal cooperative consis-ting of dressmakers and interior designers and bijoutiers. ‘I came here from Lille, via Paris,’ says David Corraux, whose shop Le Loup sells witty decorative ceramics made by himself and other artists. ‘The fact that Lyon is central in France makes it easy for me to go travelling to find new talent – and I love the fact that every time I come back from a trip something new has appeared in this part of town, a great café or an architect’s practice. And then, of course, there’s la Confluence...’
Nothing proclaims Lyon’s vibrancy and optimism more than the arts district that has sprung up at the Confluence, the docklands area where the two rivers merge. At the heart of it all is its museum. The architecture of the Musée des Confluences is amazing – is it a giant extraterrestrial armadillo or a glass-clad triceratops? One thing is for sure: this is a building that functions as a stunning, gargantuan piece of abstract sculpture. Get through the door, and it feels like a space port: you stand in a vast, cavernous foyer, where all is whiteness and silence, and look out at the point of the Presqu’île and the turbulent intermingling of the rivers. One of the first exhibitions at the museum explored the idea of a cabinet of curiosities, the random collocations of strange objects that rich or royal men once accrued. That old aristocratic amusement was a good way to kickstart the museum, which is itself a cabinet of curiosities writ large, what with its votive buddhas and pinioned butterflies, its dodo and fragment of moon rock that visitors are invited to touch to make physical contact with a world outside our own.
Cinema, that great storyteller, was born and bred in Lyon – a fact that is a greater source of civic pride than its bucketful of Michelin stars. The cinematograph was invented by two local boys, brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière, whose father was a successful manufacturer of cameras and photographic plates. The piece that is widely regarded as the first ever movie was shot on 19 March 1895 at the Lumière factory in the Lyon suburb of Monplaisir. It was short and uncomplicated: 46 seconds of footage showing workers leaving a barn-like industrial hangar. The barn is still there today but is now encased in glass and called the Institut Lumière.
In Willy Wonka-ish fashion, Père Lumière built himself a sumptuous, slightly bonkers Art Nouveau mansion right next to the sprawling factory works. It stands a few steps away from the barn that is the Bethlehem of the moving image, and has been turned into a shrine to the brothers and their epoch-making machine. Their flickering black-and-white shorts caught on amazingly fast. So fast that the public could not grasp what they were seeing – the first audiences thought they were hallucinating. Louis and Auguste were the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of their day, revolutionary entrepreneurs and progenitors of a technology that became part of everyone’s cultural landscape. The clever brothers are the fathers not just of Pinewood and Hollywood but of all the Super 8 home movies, camcorder weddings and even those YouTube cats. It all comes down to that factory shack on rue du Premier Film.
After my visit to the Lumière Brothers, I took a late-afternoon stroll along the banks of the Rhône. As in that first film, people everywhere were leaving work, heading home or to one of the busy riverside bars. I walked along the right bank of the Rhône, up the Avenue de Grande Bretagne, and ended up in the Parc de la Tête d’Or and its sumptuous rose garden. Turns out rose breeding is a local speciality, as much a lyonnais obsession as fine food. Roses have never been my favourite, but they made for a rather magical sight here, rippling in the breeze. The park’s paths were thronged with promenaders happy to chat to a wandering stranger. ‘Ah, les anglais,’ someone said to me, ‘you all love roses, don’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, without a hint of a lie. ‘Yes, we do.’
Cour des Loges has doubles from £225, including breakfast. courdesloges.com. Eurostar runs from London St Pancras to Lyon, visit eurostar.com. British Airways flies direct from London to Lyon visit ba.com.
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