Lyon

Lyon is a big city in France. France is a country in Europe.

Two rivers flow through Lyon and meet in the city. Two hills rise above them.

Lyon is a city in eastern France. At the 2023 reference count by INSEE, France's statistics office, 519,127 people lived in the commune of Lyon, and many more live in the towns around it.

The city sits where the Saône River flows into the Rhône, below two hills, Fourvière and Croix-Rousse. People have lived here for more than two thousand years, and the buildings of every age, from Roman theaters to Renaissance houses, make it a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Lyon is the capital of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. INSEE's reference population for the commune, dated 1 January 2023 and in force since 2026, is 519,127 (total population 525,314), up from 445,452 at the 1999 census. Encyclopaedia Universalis describes the city as the center of France's second-largest urban area, on a route between northern Europe and the Mediterranean along the Saône and Rhône and at the gateway to the Alps.

UNESCO's 'Historic Site of Lyon', inscribed in 1998, recognizes how more than two thousand years of settlement remain visible, from the Roman remains of Lugdunum to the medieval streets on Fourvière's slopes, the Renaissance houses of Vieux-Lyon, the classical buildings of the peninsula and the canut workers' houses of the Croix-Rousse.

On a hill in Lyon, there is a very old theater. The Romans built it long ago.

A big white church stands at the top of the hill.

On Fourvière hill, the Romans built forums and theaters, and their theaters can still be seen today. Below the hill, along the Saône, is Vieux-Lyon, the old town, with houses from the Renaissance and the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, built between 1160 and 1481.

At the top of Fourvière stands the white Fourvière Basilica, built from 1872 to 1896. It is one of the city's best-known landmarks and can be seen in the photo, on its hill above the river.

Universalis describes Roman Fourvière as the seat of the colony, with forums, temples and theaters, of which the theaters are still visible. UNESCO's list of outstanding buildings runs from the late 11th-century Manécanterie and the Romanesque Ainay Abbey Church (1107) to the Cathedral of St John the Baptist (1160–1481), notable for its unity of style despite more than three centuries of building, the Hôtel de Ville (1646–1703), the Loge du Change (1745–80) and the Fourvière Basilica (1872–96), one of the city's most important landmarks.

In Vieux-Lyon, houses such as the Thomassin House on the Place du Change (late 13th century, enlarged in the 15th) and the Chamberlain's mansion (1495–1516) show the passage from Gothic to French Renaissance style.

Lyon's metro trains run under the streets. One train even climbs a hill on a toothed rail!

Cable trains called funiculars climb up hills too.

Lyon's metro opened its first sections in 1978. It is 30.3 kilometers long and runs almost entirely underground. Two lines, B and D, run without drivers, and line C uses a rack, a toothed rail that helps it climb the Croix-Rousse hill.

The city also has trams, trolleybuses, buses and two funiculars, cable railways that climb up the hills. One ticket works on all of them.

UrbanRail.Net says Lyon offers virtually every mode of urban transport: buses, trolleybuses, trams, light rail, two funiculars, a metro with a rack railway and driverless lines (line D since 1991, line B since June 2022), and regional trains. Apart from the regional trains and the Rhônexpress to the airport, everything is run under the TCL name with one ticket and no fare zones.

The first metro sections opened in 1978, including most of line A, a short line B shuttle to Part-Dieu station and the converted line C with its rack section up the Croix-Rousse. The network is 30.3 km long, underground except for a short stretch of line C, with stations about 750 m apart, many just below street level.

Two brothers in Lyon, Louis and Auguste Lumière, made a famous movie camera.

It was called the Cinematograph. Their old house is now a museum.

Lyon is where Louis and Auguste Lumière created the Cinematograph, a machine that could film moving pictures and project them. It was born on rue du Premier-Film, 'First Film Street', in the Monplaisir district.

The brothers' family home, the Villa Lumière, is now a museum. It shows the very first Cinematograph, and it tells about their other inventions, such as the Photorama for 360-degree pictures.

The Institut Lumière presents Monplaisir's rue du Premier-Film as the birthplace of the Cinématographe; only the factory shed and the Villa Lumière, the family home, remain. The museum in the villa places the Cinematograph in the long history of moving images, from magic lanterns to the prototype Louis built for his first film tests on paper in 1894, and shows the very first Cinematograph and Edison's Kinetoscope.

The brothers were also industrialists, whose 'dry' photographic plates made them prosperous, and inventors in other fields: the Photorama for 360-degree panoramas, a stereoscopic projector for 3D films, and, during World War I, Louis's articulated hand for amputees and Auguste's 'Tulle gras' dressing to help burns and wounds heal.