Travel in Lyon-France-Culture-WorldTravelGate.net®-

Lyon, the art of living well
Lyon owes its distinctive character to its surroundings, which include two steep hills, a vast plain and two rivers. During the last decade, the city has become even more handsome, transforming and improving its squares and gardens, and implementing a lighting strategy to show off its finest features: 150 points of interest are now illuminated each night. A strategy which has been exported elsewhere throughout the world with great success, for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the city of Jerusalem, and recently Havana have all benefited from Lyon's expertise in this respect.

More than 4 million tourists visit Lyon each year, enticed by its many aesthetic pleasures and famous cuisine, spear-headed by Paul Bocuse and also to be found in the city's "bouchons," little picturesque restaurants offering a wide range of Lyon specialties.

Cultural metropolis
Lyon is the place where cinema was first brought to light by the Lumière Brothers in 1895, and possesses many important cultural institutions that all contribute to its glowing international reputation, including Lyon Opera, the Institute Lumière, the Maison de la Danse and 27 museums. The Rhône-Alpine capital positively buzzes with artistic activity, and its contemporary art and bi-annual dance festivals attract increasingly wider audiences each time around.

Lyon's destiny, as its origins and each stage in its history clearly show, has always been linked with other parts of the world: Roman Lyon, Christian Lyon, the Lyon of Renaissance bankers and poets, and the development of its silk industry which opened the way even further afield to China and Asia. An important focal point in south-east Europe in general, Lyon is a city immensely accessible to the rest of the world, as witness the staging of the recent G7 summit there. The football World Cup is a natural consequence of its outward-looking policies and already considerable international celebrity.