Lyon

Distance

44.6 km

Time

about 12.5 hours

Streets

234

Steps

21 streets with steps

Start point

Cathédrale Saint-Jean

Phone needed while walking

no

Works offline

yes

Expires

never

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Cathédrale Saint-Jean 1,500 points

  Get close to the west face before you look up. The three doorways are framed by hundreds of little carved panels at head height, and by no means all of them are pious. Inside there is a clock that does something on a timetable. I am not telling you what, or when.

• Église Saint-Nizier 500 points

  Its two towers do not match, and once you have seen that you cannot unsee it. Shops are packed tight on all four sides, so you will meet it from four different lanes and never get the whole of it at once. Go all the way round the outside before you go in.

• Fontaine Bartholdi 500 points

  Four horses coming at you out of the water, a woman driving them, and nobody involved is slowing down. Mist blows from the horses' nostrils. The thing was designed for a different town that decided it cost too much, and Lyon took it. Stand in front of the horses, not beside them.

• Place Bellecour 500 points

  Everybody photographs the big one. Off to a corner, far smaller and easy to walk past, a writer sits with the boy he invented. He was born a few streets from where you are. The rest of it is width, and width is rare on this level.

• Cour des Voraces 250 points

  You do not reach this one across a square. You step in off the street, go through a house, and come out a level further up the slope. No ticket, no gate, and very easy to walk straight past the door. Once you are inside, look up.

• Église Saint-Georges 250 points

  The downstream end of the level, right on the water, and the quietest corner in it. Come over on the footbridge instead of along the bank: the whole thing was put up to be seen from out on the river. Then turn round and look back at where you have been.

• Place des Célestins 250 points

  Small, with one very grand front along a side of it. The best thing here is not at eye level and it is not up above you either. There is a single spot in the paving to look from. You can find it.

• Place Louis Pradel 250 points

  The north end, a terrace lifted above the traffic, with the opera house over it under a long black barrel of a roof. Half the lanes up here drain into it. Sit on the edge a minute and watch which direction everybody arrives from.

• Pont de la Feuillée 250 points

  Stop halfway across. Look one way, then the other: the Saône with a hill standing over each end of it, which is this whole town in two glances. Then keep going, because nothing lives underneath this particular bit of road and I find that restful.

Eating

Actual food.

Lyon's own meal happens at the wrong time of day. The mâchon is a breakfast for people who have already done a night's work: the silk weavers came down off the Croix-Rousse looms at dawn and ate pork and tripe standing up. Everything this city is famous for eating grew out of that. Cheap cuts, small rooms, paper on the tables, and no embarrassment whatsoever about which part of the animal it is.

Checked 5 September 2026.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Not here. The Romans built up on Fourvière, the hill on the far bank, because from there you look down on two navigable rivers meeting and everything moving between the Mediterranean and the north has to pass underneath you. What you walk in this level is the ground they came down to afterwards, and a good part of it is the Presqu'île, which was filled in and levelled while the town on the hill was still busy. I have a soft spot for made ground. Somebody wanted a street badly enough to build the floor first.

Sources: www.gadagne-lyon.fr p. 1; lugdunum.grandlyon.com; www.gadagne-lyon.fr p. 2

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

-43–461

Rome. The colony went up in 43 BC and sixteen years later Augustus made it the capital of the Gauls, which is as high as anybody has ever placed this town. At its best it held some thirty-five thousand people and had spread down off the hill onto the right bank of the Saône and out across the flat. Then in 297 the job went to Trier, nearer the frontier that mattered by then, and through the third and fourth centuries the hill emptied out. By 461 the city was Burgundian.

Sources: www.gadagne-lyon.fr p. 1; www.gadagne-lyon.fr p. 2

461–558

Burgundians, then Franks. The western empire formally stopped on 4 September 476 and Roman Lugdunum stopped with it; after that Constantinople held a theory about this place and nothing more. The Franks swallowed the Burgundian kingdom in 534, and by 558 the city sat inside Chlothar's. Three sets of owners inside a hundred years, and not one of them moved a street.

Sources: www.gadagne-lyon.fr p. 2

1157–1312

The archbishop, with the paperwork to prove it. On 18 November 1157 the emperor Frederick Barbarossa handed Héracle de Montboissier the regalian rights over Lyon and the country behind it, which made the man inside the cathedral the lord of everything outside it as well. That arrangement ran for close to a hundred and fifty years. Then the archbishops had to give way to Philippe le Bel, king of France, somewhere between 1307 and 1312.

Sources: www.gadagne-lyon.fr

1312–

France, and the townspeople underneath it. Once the king held the jurisdiction, the archbishop Pierre de Savoie granted the citizens their charter on 21 June 1320: they could elect consuls to run themselves, raise their own taxes within limits, keep their own archive, stand their own night watch and hold the keys to the town gates. That archive is still open. It is the reason I can tell you any of this, and it is why I am fairly sure nobody wrote down a single word about me.

Sources: www.archives-lyon.fr; www.gadagne-lyon.fr

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. This level is on the wrong hill, and that is the whole point of it. The Roman town sat up on Fourvière. Through the third and fourth centuries it emptied out and everybody came down: to the right bank of the Saône, and onto the Canabae, the strip of the Presqu'île between Ainay and the Terreaux that had been filled in and levelled during the first century. So a good part of what you are walking here was made on purpose, before there was anything on it worth walking to.

   Sources: www.gadagne-lyon.fr p. 2

2. From the last quarter of the fifteenth century the presses here made Lyon one of the capitals of the book, behind Venice and Paris, and four trade fairs a year brought the buyers in to empty them. The workshops crowded around a single street, the rue Mercière, which is on your route. There is a passage on this level still named after the printers, and the museum of printing is a few doors off it, in a Renaissance house on the rue de la Poulaillerie. That address is the second reason I like this trade.

   Sources: numelyo.bm-lyon.fr; www.lyon.fr

3. In 1528 a cloth merchant on the slopes of the Croix-Rousse turned up two broken pieces of a bronze sheet. Engraved on it, word for word, was a speech the emperor Claudius made to the senate in Rome in the year 48, arguing that the leading men of Gaul should be allowed to sit in it. Two hundred and twenty-two kilos of bronze. The city bought it in 1530 for fifty-eight gold écus and hung it in the town house, and there is a street up on that slope still carrying its name.

   Sources: lugdunum.grandlyon.com; www.gadagne-lyon.fr p. 2; www.hisoma.mom.fr

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 234streets
• 2,323dots
• 35.6km of street
• 44.6km on foot
• 12.5hours at a stroll