Lyon holds France's second fine-arts collection, the birthplace of cinema, and a silk trade that shaped European taste for 400 years. This route runs through working museums, a Nouvel-rebuilt opera house and murals painted for former weavers.
Housed in a 17th-century Benedictine abbey off Place des Terreaux, France's largest fine-arts collection outside the Louvre spans Egyptian antiquities to Picasso across roughly 70 rooms. Open Wed–Mon 10:00–18:00.
Set in the 15th-century Hôtel de la Couronne, this museum traces Lyon's 16th-century run as Europe's second printing capital: hand presses, incunabula, wood type and a floor of Art Nouveau posters. Wed–Sun 10:30–18:00.
Coop Himmelb(l)au's deconstructivist crystal-and-cloud of steel and glass sits on the spit where the Rhône meets the Saône. Inside, anthropology, natural history and design objects are staged as narrative rather than taxonomy.
A 1930s sugar warehouse on Quai Rambaud, now Lyon's contemporary-art hangar and the anchor venue of the Biennale d'Art Contemporain. Around it stand Jakob+MacFarlane's Cube Orange and Green Cube on the old dock buildings.
Jean Nouvel gutted the 1831 opera house in 1993, keeping the neoclassical shell and its eight muses, then dropped a black glass barrel vault over the whole thing. A rehearsal studio sits in the roof, the amphitheatre below street level.
Lyon's Italian-style playhouse has occupied the site of a Célestins convent since 1792, rebuilt by Gaspard André after the 1880 fire. The red-and-gold horseshoe seats about 1,100; the underground Célestine studio takes 200.
Two hôtels particuliers on rue de la Charité hold some 2.5 million textile pieces — Coptic tunics, Byzantine and Persian silks, and the Lyon weaving that dressed Versailles and the Kremlin. Saved from closure in 2018.
The 2,100-seat concrete shell on rue Garibaldi, opened 1975, is home to the Orchestre National de Lyon and to the Cavaillé-Coll organ moved here from the Palais du Trocadéro. Evening concerts usually begin at 20:00.
On the Croix-Rousse plateau, weavers still run Jacquard looms in the workshop where the canuts' cooperative began in 1840. The demonstration covers punch cards, the 1831 uprising, and why the district's ceilings are four metres high.
Boulevard des Canuts carries Europe's largest trompe-l'œil mural: 1,200m² painted by CitéCréation in 1987, then repainted in 1997 and 2013 so its fictional residents visibly age. The staircase, shopfronts and dog are all paint.
The Lumière family villa in Monplaisir, plus the surviving hangar wall where the brothers filmed workers leaving the factory in March 1895 — the first film. Cameras, autochrome plates and an original Cinématographe inside.
France's oldest continuously running jazz club, in a stone cellar on rue Lanterne since 1948. Live programming five or six nights a week — bebop, New Orleans revival, and a Monday jam session open to anyone carrying an instrument.