Lyon Cathedral

Lyon Cathedral tickets: which one to buy

Lyon's cathedral sits at the foot of the hill in the old town, free to enter, with the funicular station to the great hilltop basilica a minute away. The two are almost always visited together and the order matters: take the funicular up first, look at the view and the basilica, then walk down through the gardens and finish here, rather than climbing in the afternoon heat.

Walking tours of old Lyon are excellent value and centre on the traboules, the covered passages running through Renaissance courtyards, which are largely invisible to visitors who do not know the doors. Those tours include the cathedral. Food tours work the same streets. Entry to the archaeological garden beside the church, with the remains of earlier churches on the site, is free and usually missed. Nothing needs booking except the food tours, which fill up. The square in front is one of the few flat open spaces in the old town and is used for markets in summer.

Visiting Lyon Cathedral: what to see

Construction began about 1180 on the ruins of a sixth-century church and finished in 1476, yet the building holds together stylistically better than that span suggests, moving from Romanesque at the east end to flamboyant Gothic at the west. The apse keeps twelfth-century stained glass, among the oldest in France. Look at the west front closely: the hundreds of small carved medallions in the doorways are largely intact, while the larger figures above them were smashed by Protestant forces in 1562 and never replaced, so the front reads as a record of the wars of religion.

Inside, the astronomical clock in the north transept dates in part from the fourteenth century, shows the positions of the sun, moon and stars over Lyon, and performs a short automaton scene at set hours. The Bourbon chapel, built in the 1480s, is the finest piece of late Gothic carving in the building. The cathedral is part of the UNESCO listing covering historic Lyon. The nave floor keeps sections of medieval mosaic reset during the nineteenth-century restoration.

Lyon Cathedral opening hours and the best time to go

The clock performs several times a day at advertised hours and is the one thing worth timing a visit around. Mornings are quiet inside. The great event in Lyon is the festival of lights in early December, four nights when the whole city is illuminated and the cathedral square carries one of the main installations; hotels are booked months ahead and the crowds are enormous. Summer brings a dance and music festival to the Roman theatres on the hill above.

The old town streets are busy with restaurants in the evening, many of them aimed squarely at tourists, and the better bouchons are a few streets north. Winter fog in the Rhone valley can sit for days. The church closes over lunch. Allow forty minutes inside, plus the archaeological garden, and plan the funicular around it. Concerts of early music are held here through the autumn and the programme is posted at the west door.