Lyon

The white basilica on top of Fourvière hill watches over the city like a fortress, its four corner towers giving it the local nickname of "the upside-down elephant". It was built between 1872 and 1884, paid for by public subscription after the people of Lyon vowed to honour the Virgin Mary if the city was spared in the Franco-Prussian War. The interior is a dazzling, almost overwhelming spread of gold, marble and mosaics telling stories of Mary and of France, with a quieter crypt below. Beside it stands the older chapel topped by the gilded statue of the Virgin that sparked the Fête des Lumières, and the slim iron tower next door, a sort of mini Eiffel Tower from 1894, now carries television aerials.

The esplanade in front of the basilica is the best viewpoint in Lyon, looking straight over the roofs of the old town to the Presqu'île, the Rhône and, on clear days, the snowy line of the Alps with Mont Blanc on the horizon. Entry to the basilica is free; guided tours of the roofs and towers are run by the sanctuary and are worth booking ahead.

TipRide the funicular up from Vieux Lyon station, then walk back down through the Jardin du Rosaire, a zigzag garden path that delivers you into the old town in about 15 minutes.

A few minutes' walk south of the basilica, two Roman theatres are cut into the slope of the hill. The larger one, begun under the emperor Augustus and later enlarged to seat around 10,000 people, is still used for concerts and plays, most famously during the Nuits de Fourvière festival in June and July. The smaller odeon next to it was built for music and recitals and keeps part of its patterned marble floor. Wandering the stone tiers is free, and the site opens early, from 7am, until 9pm from May to September and 7pm in winter.

Built into the hillside beside them, the Lugdunum museum is a clever piece of 1970s concrete architecture whose ramps spiral down past mosaics, inscriptions and models of the Roman city. Its star exhibit is the Claudian Table, a bronze plaque recording a speech by the emperor Claudius, who was born in Lyon, arguing that men from Gaul should be allowed into the Roman Senate. The museum is closed on Mondays, and full admission costs a few euros.

At the foot of the hill, on the bank of the Saône, the cathedral took about three centuries to build, so its Romanesque apse blends into a Gothic nave and a flat-topped facade decorated with hundreds of small carved medallions. Inside, look for the 14th-century astronomical clock, whose figures of angels, a cockerel and the Annunciation spring into motion several times a day, and the jewel-coloured medieval glass of the choir. The square outside, Place Saint-Jean, is the natural starting point for exploring the old town.

Squeezed between the Saône and the hill, Vieux Lyon is one of the largest Renaissance quarters in Europe. Its three districts, Saint-Paul, Saint-Jean and Saint-Georges, were home to Italian and German bankers and merchants in the 15th and 16th centuries, who built tall houses in honey, pink and ochre stone with spiral staircases, galleries and inner courtyards. Rue Saint-Jean and Rue du Bœuf are the main lanes, lined with bouchons, toy shops and souvenir stalls; the Musée Gadagne, in a vast Renaissance mansion, covers the history of the city and its puppet theatre, home of the Lyonnais glove puppet Guignol.

The quarter's great secret is the traboule, a covered passage that cuts through the ground floor of a building and its courtyard from one street to the next. Silk workers, porters and residents used them as shortcuts, and some are open to walkers by day. Push open the heavy doors to find hidden courtyards such as the one at the Maison du Crible on Rue du Bœuf, with its rounded pink stair tower, known as the Tour Rose, or the long passage that runs from 54 Rue Saint-Jean to 27 Rue du Bœuf.

TipThe traboules are inside private homes. Open doors are marked with a small plaque; keep voices down, never smoke inside, and respect any that are closed.

Cross the footbridge over the Saône to reach the Presqu'île and its vast central square, one of the largest open squares in Europe. Its sandy red surface is almost empty except for an equestrian statue of Louis XIV in the middle, so the square feels like a stage with the basilica as its backdrop. On the west side stands a small statue of the writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was born in Lyon, sitting with the Little Prince. The tourist office is on the square, and the city's main shopping street, Rue de la République, starts on the north side.

North of Bellecour, the Presqu'île is a grid of elegant 19th-century streets, but a few older lanes survive. Rue Mercière, once the street of printers and booksellers, is now a strip of restaurants whose tables fill the pavement on summer evenings. Just to the south, Place des Jacobins is centred on a white marble fountain with statues of four Lyon-born artists, framed by handsome apartment blocks. Wander a few streets east to the riverside quays of the Rhône, where former roads have become a long promenade with cycle paths, lawns and moored barges that turn into bars at night.

At the north end of the Presqu'île, this square is the grand civic heart of the city. The 17th-century town hall fills one side, and in front of it the Bartholdi Fountain shows a woman driving a chariot pulled by four wild horses. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor, is better known for the Statue of Liberty in New York. Just behind the town hall, the Opéra de Lyon wears a striking glass barrel roof added by Jean Nouvel in the 1990s on top of the old theatre walls.

Housed in a former Benedictine abbey on Place des Terreaux, Lyon's fine art museum has one of the richest collections in France outside Paris. It covers Egyptian antiquities, Greek and Roman sculpture and medieval art, and its painting galleries run from Italian and Flemish masters through Rubens, Rembrandt and Delacroix to Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse. Even if you skip the galleries, the old cloister garden is free to enter, a peaceful square of trees, benches and statues in the busiest part of town.

A short walk west of Terreaux, on the corner of the Quai Saint-Vincent, an entire blank building wall has been painted in trompe l'oeil as an ordinary apartment block. Look closely and the people on the balconies and in the shop windows are famous figures from Lyon's history, including the Roman emperor Claudius, the Lumière brothers, Paul Bocuse and Saint-Exupéry with the Little Prince. Lyon has dozens of these painted walls, and this is the best place to start.

The steep hill north of Terreaux was the world of the canuts, the silk weavers. In the 19th century tens of thousands of them worked here on Jacquard looms in tall apartment buildings with high ceilings to fit the machines, and in 1831 and 1834 their revolts over pay were among the first workers' uprisings of the industrial age. The slopes, the Pentes de la Croix-Rousse, are now an arty district of stairways, small galleries, bars and street art. Climb the Montée de la Grande-Côte for views back over the city, and look into the Cour des Voraces at Place Colbert, a courtyard with a monumental six-storey open staircase that is the most famous traboule on this side of the river.

At the top of the hill, the Croix-Rousse plateau feels like a village of its own, proud of its independent spirit. The Boulevard de la Croix-Rousse hosts a busy morning food market every day except Monday. At the Maison des Canuts, a small museum and workshop, guides demonstrate a working Jacquard loom and explain how the punched-card system that controlled the patterns went on to inspire early computing. At the eastern end of the plateau, the Gros Caillou, a large glacial boulder, marks a viewpoint over the Rhône.

On the Boulevard des Canuts, one of Europe's largest painted walls shows a whole Croix-Rousse street scene, with stairs climbing past shopfronts and residents going about their day. The mural has been repainted several times since 1987 so that its people and details age along with the neighbourhood. It is a short walk from the Hénon metro station on line C.

Across the Rhône, Lyon's great park opened in 1857 and covers over 100 hectares around a large lake with rowing boats. It is free to enter and includes a small zoo with an African plain area, a botanical garden with huge Victorian glasshouses and a rose garden that fills with blooms from late May. Locals jog, picnic and play pétanque here at weekends, and the little train and pony rides make it a good place for children.

Lyon's covered food market, near Part-Dieu station, gathers around 55 traders under one roof: cheesemongers with towering piles of Saint-Marcellin, butchers, chocolatiers, pastry shops and oyster bars. It was renamed after the city's most famous chef, who shopped here for his restaurants. Rather than buying to cook, most visitors come to graze: perch at a counter for a dozen oysters and a glass of white wine, or pick up saucisson, pralines and cheese for a picnic.

TipSunday late morning is the liveliest time, when families gather for oysters before lunch, but many stalls close early in the afternoon on Sundays.

In the eastern district of Monplaisir, Auguste and Louis Lumière ran a photographic factory, and in 1895 they filmed its workers walking out of the gates, one of the very first motion pictures. The family's ornate villa is now a cinema museum with early cameras, the original Cinématographe and screenings of the brothers' short films, and the shed of the original factory is today a cinema. The street outside is named Rue du Premier-Film. Take metro line D to Monplaisir-Lumière.

Lyon was a centre of the French Resistance in the Second World War, and also the base of the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, who tortured the Resistance leader Jean Moulin. This museum, in a building the Gestapo used during the occupation, tells the story of daily life, collaboration, resistance and deportation through photos, objects and recorded testimony. It is sobering and very well presented, and it is close to the Jean Macé metro and train station.

At the southern tip of the Presqu'île, where the Rhône and Saône finally meet, this museum of science and humankind sits in a startling building of glass and steel that looks like a crystal cloud. Opened in 2014, it mixes natural history, anthropology and the story of the universe, with dinosaur skeletons, meteorites, Egyptian mummies, insects and objects from cultures around the world, arranged to provoke questions rather than follow a strict timeline. Walk to the end of the garden behind it to stand at the point of the confluence. The surrounding Confluence district, a former industrial area of docks and warehouses, has been rebuilt with brightly coloured offices and apartments along the Saône. The museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday, 10.30am to 6.30pm, and daily during French school holidays except in summer.

About 35 km north-east of Lyon, this tiny walled village on a hilltop is one of the best-preserved medieval towns in France, so convincing that it is often used as a film set. Cobbled lanes lead between half-timbered houses and stone mansions to the main square, with its huge old lime tree. Sample the galette de Pérouges, a thin, sugary, buttery tart served warm, in one of the village inns. Regional TER trains run from Lyon Part-Dieu to Meximieux-Pérouges station in about half an hour, followed by an uphill walk of around 25 minutes.

North of the city, the Beaujolais hills are a patchwork of vines, villages and wooded summits. In the south, the Pierres Dorées area has villages such as Oingt built in golden-yellow stone that glows at sunset, while further north the ten crus, including Morgon, Fleurie and Moulin-à-Vent, produce the more serious, age-worthy reds made from the Gamay grape. Wine estates welcome visitors for tastings, often without an appointment in summer, and the climb up Mont Brouilly gives wide views over the vineyards. A car or an organised tour is the easiest way to visit, as public transport only reaches the larger towns such as Villefranche-sur-Saône.

TipThe new vintage, Beaujolais Nouveau, is released on the third Thursday of November, with parties across the region and in Lyon's bars.