Traboules
In Vieux Lyon and La Croix-Rousse Saône are an architectural feature unique to this city: Traboules are delightful renaissance passageways, some 40 of which are open to the public, running beneath buildings in the direction of the Saône River.
They gave the city’s silk workers direct access to riverbank, making it quick and easy to transport textiles, while also offering shelter from the elements.
Parc de la Tête d’Or
A little way north of the centre is one of the largest urban parks in the country, with a zoo and France’s foremost botanical garden within its boundaries.
If you’re around in spring then the international rose garden should be one of your first ports of call in the city. The botanical attractions are spectacular too, with more than 20,000 plant varieties and the most graceful 19th-century greenhouses you could hope to see, thick with the scent of chlorophyll.
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
Housed in a former abbey from the 1600s, the Musée des Beaux-Arts is France’s largest fine art museum after the Louvre in Paris. There are 70 rooms here, with paintings from the 1300s to the 1900s, sculpture and displays of both Egyptian and Oriental art. The Antiquities department is a trove of some 600 Ancient Egyptian artefacts, including reliefs, busts, statuettes and sarcophagi, as well as monumental gates recovered from the Medamud temple.