Self-Guided Tours in Lyon

Lyon's old town keeps a trick self-guided games are built for: traboules, the covered passageways silk workers cut through building courtyards to move cloth without the rain. A route through Vieux Lyon ducks in and out of them between Cathedrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste and the narrow lanes below Fourviere hill, past the Renaissance facades that earned the quarter UNESCO World Heritage status, not just a pretty backdrop. Place Bellecour, one of the largest open squares in France, and the walk to Pont Bonaparte along the Saone give the flatter counterpoint. Two rivers meeting at the tip of the Presqu'ile peninsula shape most of the walking here more than any single monument does.

A couple of self-guided games cover this ground differently. The scavenger hunt uses the World City Trail app: buy a ticket, get a ten-digit code, and follow GPS prompts between ten-plus stops — the Musee des Tissus, the Fresque des Lyonnais mural, the Hotel de Ville — with optional voice narration at each one and restaurant tips along the way. A separate Questo quest is shorter and looser, built around puzzles and trivia rather than named landmarks, closer to an hour and better suited to a couple with no fixed plan than a family collecting sights. Both start whenever you turn up and pause for as long as lunch takes.

Practical. Lyon sits at the edge of the Rhone valley, so summers run warmer than Paris — July and August regularly clear 28C with the kind of humidity that makes the shaded traboules genuinely useful rather than just decorative. Winters are damp and grey, closer to 5C, with fog that can sit over the rivers for days. The traboules and covered passages throw a phone's GPS off by a few metres, so following the written clue matters more than watching the blue dot. Weekend mornings, before the Saturday market fills Quai Saint-Antoine, are the easiest time to walk both routes without doubling back through crowds.