Are we talking about the same thing?

A recent article in the online English-language magazine The Local, entitled "The daftest Trip Advisor comments about France," featured an array of damning and often entertaining reviews of famous locations, mainly in and around Paris.

Although I am generally more interested in less well-known gems, the article made me wonder what people wrote about the highlights of my adopted city. Surely, I mused, visitors would be more positive in their comments about Lyon, France's second city (sorry, Bordeaux, Marseilles et al) and the undisputed capital of the Gauls.

A quick trip to the Trip Advisor site proved eye-opening.

Drama, detonations & dastardly deeds

Despite its name, FNAC Bellecour does not lie directly on Place Bellecour, but rather at the start of the adjacent pedestrian precinct commonly referred to as "Rue de la Ré," where it is sandwiched between a chain café and a chain retail clothing store.

Like all FNAC stores, the interior is a combination of boringly nondescript false walls and equally nondescript false low ceilings, the combined effect of which is undoubtedly designed to avoid distracting the consumer's attention from the purpose of his visit.

However, the façade is the polar opposite of the building's interior; a beautifully ornate creation centred on two huge topless female statues seemingly beckoning you inside. Strangely enough, though, no plaque, architect's mark or date stamp gives any indication of the building's provenance or history. So I decided to investigate.

What I found wasn't all sugar and spice and all things nice.

Great Mosque

The Grande Mosquée de Lyon is situated at 146 Boulevard Pinel on the eastern edge of the city at the border between the 8th arondissement and the adjacent town of Bron.

(It's also right next door to the subject of my Lyonnais Mystery No. 1)

Although it is not as big as its counterpart in Paris, the Great Mosque of Lyon is the sixth-largest mosque in all of France.

Today it celebrates the twentieth anniversary of its inauguration.

Garage Atlas

Walking or driving along the Avenue Maréchal-de-Saxe in Lyon's 3rd arrondissement – especially in the summer, when the trees are full of leaves – it's easy to miss the seven-storey white Art Deco building that takes up an entire block at numbers 65-69 and continues along adjacent along Rue Le Royer, Rue de Bonnel and Rue Vendôme. 

If you do spot it, you are most likely to notice the lines and geometric shapes covering the façade and the somewhat dated-looking restaurant that occupies part of the ground floor of the huge building on the Avenue de Saxe side. Glance up at the sign above the central door framed between two Doric columns, and you get a hint about the listed building's former life. 

The restaurant's name? 'Le Garage'.

Barrage de Cusset

The geography and history of Lyon are defined by two rivers. Hemmed in to the west by the rocky outcrop that is Fourvière hill, the city's growth over the centuries has depended on its inhabitants' ability to cross, bridge and eventually settle on the opposite, eastern banks of first the Saone and then, much later, the far larger Rhone. 

But whereas the course of the Saone was comparatively easy to control, the mighty Rhone was prone to flash flooding, and numerous attempts to rein it in were literally washed away. So it wasn't until the late 19th century that someone came up with a plan that worked. 

The outcome was nothing short of revolutionary - for both Lyon and France as a whole.

Prison de Montluc

Every week, my wife and I run by what appears to be an unfinished mural along Rue du Dauphiné in the 3e. On the far left of this wall there is a painting of World War II resistance hero Jean Moulin, at the other end, some 200 metres down the road, there are two carefree children in modern clothes, happily racing one another. In between,  names are crudely scrawled - almost scratched - on a somewhat bland blue-and-brown background. 

We had always assumed that these were the names of people whom the artist would one day paint at that location on the wall. But another part of the fresco suggests otherwise: a series of painted tally marks which topple over and eventually turn into birds and fly away. 

One day, curiosity got the better of me, and I followed the wall around to the other side. And there I discovered what the mural meant. Because this was the scene of possibly the darkest chapter in the history of Lyon: the Prison de Montluc. 

Soixante-neuf

Ask a schoolboy what the number 69 means, and you're likely to be met with a splutter and a muffled guffaw. Because, as any teenager knows, "69" and its French equivalent, soixante-neuf, stand for mutual oral sex.

Serge Gainsburg and his breathy-voiced English girlfriend, Jane Birkin, famously sang the song "69, Année Erotique". However contrary to common belief, the number sixty-nine came to represent this sexual position not because of the way the participants' bodies line up (the circular part of each constituent digit signifying the heads and the trailing ends their legs), but because of Lyon – or rather the early Lyonnais themselves.

As fake as houses

Back in October, I was fascinated to read about three imaginary homes in a post on our sister blog, Invisible Paris.

Never having considered the possibility of buildings being anything other than what they appeared to be, I found the idea of pretend houses both amusing and intriguing. 

Could there, I wondered, also be artificial abodes in Lyon?

To my immense surprise, I discovered that there were at least five of them in my adopted home town on the peninsula between the Rivers Rhône and Saône. Two of these are in the 4th arrondissement, the other three in the 1st.

Seeing Italy

Uh-oh!

Lyon is some 160 kilometres from Chamonix, the ski resort on the Italian-French border. Mont Blanc, the mountain that separates the two countries at this point, is the highest not only in France, but in all the Alps, topping out at 4810 metres above mean sea level.

Although the Swiss border is much closer than the Italian one (Geneva is just 110km away), you can sometimes see Mont Blanc from Lyon's Fourvière hill, Croix-Rousse and other higher elevations, like the Mont d'Or just to the north-west.

On particularly clear days, you are treated to a whole mountain range stretching along the Italian border, and Mont Blanc itself appears to be just a few miles beyond the city limits. However, pretty as the sight is, it's not a good omen. 

Lyonnais mystery no. 2

The grand Louis XIII-style building situated at 8 Rue Godefroy in the upmarket 6th arrondissement is completely unique in Lyon and considered one of the city's most important hôtels particulier (mansions). Yet it isn't a stop on any of the innumerable guided tours. Nor is it featured in any of the guidebooks that I've come across. It is therefore theoretically ideal for inclusion on the Invisible Lyon blog.

However, when one of my readers asked me to look into its past, I soon found that this was a lot easier said than done.

Birdy Kids

Lyon is a cultural and artistic hub second only to Paris in France. Fabulous architecture aside, it has well over 200 large-scale frescoes and trompe-l’œil, more than 60 of which were painted by the prolific Cité Création alone. On alternate years Lyon holds the Biennale d'Art Contemporain, currently in its 12th edition, and it runs the hugely popular annual Lumière international film festival, which this year featured Quentin Tarantino.

Take a walk around the city, and it's clear to see that Lyon also has a vibrant and active street art scene. I already wrote about one goldmine of street art in the disused factories along Rue Feuillat. I've also photographed a lot of noteworthy street art for the Invisible Lyon Instagram account.

However, the most omnipresent and instantly recognisable street art in Lyon stems from a three-man collective that calls itself Birdy Kids. Last week I interviewed the group's unofficial spokesman: Guillaume.

Gare des Brotteaux

A perfectly restored Haussmannian building with an ornate sandstone facade, huge bay windows, a curved roof and a large, central clock stands on Boulevard Jules Favre in Lyon's swanky 6th arrondissement. This is the former Gare des Brotteaux. 
 
The building's resemblance to the Gare d'Orsay in Paris is no coincidence, because the two were built in the same era. But this wasn't the first railway station on the site.

Ahmed the gargoyle

Like all monuments exposed to the perils of pollution, the Cathédral St. Jean-Baptiste in Lyon is constantly having to be cleaned and renovated. Even though the cleaning is done by laser nowadays rather than high-pressure water, which tended to scratch off yet more of the fine sandstone, sometimes the delicate centuries-old structures are so worn away by acid rain that they need to be replaced completely.

In 2010, it was decided that a gargoyle on the north wall of the cathedral - on the left-hand side if you're facing the front - had reached the "point of no return". Sculptor Emmanuel Fourchet was therefore given the task of designing and producing a suitable statue that might take its place. 

Rue Feuillat

A long wall interspersed by many tall windows and just as many rainwater pipes stretches most of the way along Rue Feuillat between Cours Albert Thomas and Avenue Lacassagne in the 3rd Arrondisement. Halfway down, an imposing stone gate with intricate ironwork and stained-glass clear denotes what must once have been the main entrance. Peering through the smashed safety glass of the windows, you can still see an elaborate iron roof and get a sense that this was once something big.

Big it was indeed. The stepped walls enclose a behemoth of a site spanning 75,000m² and employing nearly two thousand people in its heyday. For this is the oldest existing car factory in Lyon, although the grounds have changed hands many times over the last century.

Trotinettes

Lyon has an efficient and modern public transport network of underground, tram and bus lines. It also has an excellent city bike scheme, Vélo'v, which has been in operation since 2005 as a public-private partnership between the city and advertising company JCDecaux, with 350 hiring stations throughout the city and some 3000 bicycles which you can rent for just €1.50 for 24 hours (provided you change bicycles every 30 minutes). 

Transport operator TCL also has an extremely handy iPhone app which not only calculates journey times on public transport from any point in the city, but provides real-time information about where Vélo'v stations are located and - more importantly - how many bicycles and bike parking spaces are available at each.

But the real people-mover in Lyon in the literal sense of the word is the humble scooter, or trotinette, as it is known in French. Light, portable, collapsible and practical, the scooter has become far more than a children's plaything on the streets of Lyon.

Lyonnais mystery no. 1

An odd collection of buildings on the corner of Avenue Rockefeller and Boulevard Pinel in the 8th arrondissement presented me with my first Lyonnais mystery. Squat, rectangular and almost windowless, these three strange, flat-roofed buildings seemed so out of place, so different from the surrounding architecture, that they immediately drew my attention. 

 I'd first noticed them when I looked out of my hotel window. There, at the far end of a fenced-off sort of no-man's-land of tall grass next to the Grand Mosque in the Quartier Mermoz, stood three tall buildings, each about the length and breadth of a football pitch and two floors high, with what looked like watchtowers and aerial walkways running between them. Each was very different in its own way, though they clearly belonged together. But what the Guignol could they be?

Hôtel-Dieu

Like a dowager reclining on the banks of the river while her grandchildren frolic in the water, a once-stunning princess whose best days are long since behind her, the massive Hôtel-Dieu sprawls along the west side of the presque-île; the wedge of land in the centre of Lyon at the tip of which the city's two rivers, the Rhone and Saône, merge. For although it is one of the largest buildings in Lyon, it goes largely unnoticed by the people, cars and even the waters that rush by this locked and shuttered behemoth.