Mid-range · 6-hour walk · Lyon
The Presqu'île and the Croix-Rousse in six hours
Bellecour, the old hospital, the fine arts museum and the climb to the silk workers' hill.
Between the Rhône and the Saône lies the Presqu'île, the long tongue of land where Lyon built its squares, its hospital and its city hall. North of it the land rises steeply to the Croix-Rousse, where silk workers, the canuts, moved their tall-windowed workshops in the 19th century and rose in revolt more than once. This route walks the length of the Presqu'île and climbs the slope to finish on the plateau.
The route, stop by stop
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Place Bellecour
At 312 by 200 metres, the largest pedestrian square in Europe, with François-Frédéric Lemot's equestrian Louis XIV (1825) in the middle. The city's tourist office has its pavilion on the square.
15 min here Walk here → -
Grand Hôtel-Dieu
Lyon's hospital for some 800 years, rebuilt in the 17th and 18th centuries with Jacques-Germain Soufflot's long façade on the Rhône. Its cloisters and courtyards now hold shops, cafés and a hotel.
25 min here Walk here → -
Place des Terreaux
The city hall square. Its fountain is by Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty: Bordeaux ordered it, found it too expensive, and Lyon bought it in 1890 and unveiled it in 1891.
15 min here Walk here → -
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon
One of France's largest fine arts museums, in a 17th-century Benedictine abbey on the Place des Terreaux. Its collections run from Egyptian antiquities to Monet and Picasso, and the cloister garden is free to sit in.
90 min here Walk here → -
Montée de la Grande-Côte
The steepest way up the slopes of the Croix-Rousse, straight up from the Presqu'île. Turn round at the top for the view over the rooftops to Fourvière.
15 min here Walk here → -
Cour des Voraces
The best-known traboule in Lyon, a courtyard whose open staircase climbs the full height of the building and was a landmark of the canut revolts. It is a residential building: visit in daytime and quietly.
15 min here Walk here → -
Gros Caillou
A boulder carried here by the Rhône glacier, set at the eastern end of the Boulevard de la Croix-Rousse as the plateau's emblem. The view east goes over the Rhône to the city's newer districts.
10 min here Walk here → -
Maison des Canuts
A silk workshop where guides work the Jacquard loom, the punched-card machine invented in Lyon by Joseph-Marie Jacquard in the early 1800s. Visits are guided at set times; the shop sells silk woven nearby.
45 min here Walk here → -
Mur des Canuts
A trompe-l'œil wall of some 1,200 square metres painting a Croix-Rousse street of stairs, shops and residents. It was first painted in 1987 and has been repainted since.
15 min here Walk here →
More walks in Lyon
More in Lyon
Every walking route in Lyon, the full Lyon guide for where to stay and what a day costs, or walks in other cities.