Places/France

Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes

Lyon

A river city that takes lunch more seriously than Paris takes monuments.

Lyon is the French city to choose if eating is the point of the journey. Two rivers, a peninsula of shops and squares, and an old town of traboules — covered passages — that are better with a local habit than with a scavenger hunt.

It is two hours from Paris by fast train and a different temperature of life. Stay. Do not turn it into lunch on the way to somewhere else.

See

• Vieux Lyon in the morning

  The cathedral, a traboule if one is open, and out before the streets become a queue of the same photograph.

• The peninsula

  Place des Terreaux and the streets south of it. This is where the city buys flowers and argues about lunch.

• Croix-Rousse

  The hill of the silk workers. A climb or the metro, then a neighbourhood that still has errands.

• One museum, if at all

  The Gallo-Roman museum if the ruins interest you. Otherwise the city itself is the collection. Do not force a Louvre-shaped day onto Lyon.