The Lights of Lyon

The French can do Christmas lights. All of the tiny villages around Cotignac have lights of all colors and designs draped over their narrow streets. In Cotignac, we watched as the main street was closed for bucket trucks to haul workers into the trees draping lights along their trunks. The only puzzle is when the lights actually come on. We still haven’t seen them lit. But when it comes to lights, Lyon has everyone beat with their annual Fete des Lumieres. The Fete is to thank Mary for sparing the Lyonnais from the plague centuries ago. Residents line their window sills with votive candles every December 8. That’s how it all started, but now it is a four day festival that is about all things lit and it’s a big deal.

When we arrived from the train, I jostled my way, pushing and shoving (a taste of things to come), through the tourist office. I gave up actually talking to anyone and settled for the printed program. It was all we needed. We explored a bit of the city, had a good lunch at a local bouchon, and rested before the big opening that evening.


Lyon is hard for me to get my arms around. It is physically positioned along two rivers – the Rhone and Saone. The old town rises on a hill overlooking the Saone and is a maze of narrow streets and charming restaurants overlooked by a large, angular, white Basilique Notre Dame de Fourviere. Lyon is a food center for France and the menus here have a wider variety of fare. In fact, we had to carefully translate the menus. In other cities a plate listed as veal would typically be a cutlet. Here there was veal liver, veal head or even veal foot (yes – foot); the same went for duck and chicken. While Lyon is a very large city (2nd or 3rd in France) it feels mid-sized.
People bustled to and from work and classes. There were tons of shops for home and fashion but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a bit non-descript – or as non-descript as a French city can be. But Lyon is far from non-descript when the sun goes down and the lights come on.

On the first night of the Fete, the residential buildings had row after row of votive candles on the window sills. Candle light flickered with the wind and was charming but was overshadowed by the monumental lighting of the big buildings.
The Fete includes over 70 “animations” dotted over the city. We literally walked for hours on two nights watching the light shows and we just visited the downtown and old town areas. For me, the creativity was the most impressive. I never dreamed that light could create such experiences. There were, of course, lights strung over streets and buildings flooded with colored light, and there was even the occasional Christmas tree in a square; humdrum when compared to the animations.
Each animation was a location, church, statue, or public building where light and sound combined into an experience. The experience came from either the light pattern itself or from the background onto which it was projected. For example, unexpected surfaces became screens. A ferris wheel in huge Place Bellecour was covered in white mesh and was the backdrop for a film. An enormous round screen in front of Primatiale St-Jean was projected with the surface of the moon and hoisted 15 stories in the air by a crane – over and over again each night.




One of my favorites was the beautiful, classic, marble sculpture standing by the Hotel de Ville. It is, on any day, a powerful piece of art with white horses straining out of the fountain as the lovely woman rides in a chariot above the waves. What is smooth, classic marble by day, like you’d see in dozens of French squares, became flamboyant, garish and alive through lights.
With elaborate lights and computers, each surface of the sculpture took on new colors that changed and moved. The anger of the horses was palpable when communicated through turquoise, orange and pink that highlighted their grimaces. The voluptuous woman regally presided over us all in robes of red, orange and pink. In the end, the sculpture went up in “flames” of reds, yellows and oranges. You could almost feel the heat.


Then there was a large flat pool of water with a simple fountain spraying water into the air that became an infinity of droplets of mist – beautiful, but nothing unusual. Turns out, droplets of water can be a projection surface. We stood on the edge of the fountain with a few hundred of our closest friends and looked intently into the mist. There, a woman’s head, the full size of the spray, emerged and then sank calmly back into the pool. Poseidon with his trident rose confidently out of the water to look over the crowd. It was magic and all from light on water.




The other surprise was how they used the surfaces of ornate buildings around the city to exploit their surfaces of columns, cornices, towers and arches to shift, grow, bulge, recede, break and twist.
Before our eyes, an old church became overgrown with vines that sprouted leaves covering the façade until the church ultimately crumbled and was carried away by birds – all as we watched, staring at the reality of the building.




Lyon’s theater, a large, square, classically designed building, was also lovely but unassuming during the day with its arched entry and arched second story windows crowned with medallions.
But at night, the building was alive and inhabited. The show started simply enough with the outlines of the building highlighted and pulsing. Shifting lights made the surfaces appear to move. Each building element became outlined in light – just as it was in reality – with the lines of columns, pediments and friezes accentuated by fine lines of white light. And then it moved. The building bulged then twisted, plunged and rose. The center began to fracture as though from the inside. It pulsated and moved until finally a face, the size of the building, emerged created from the fine white lines of light.
The medallions over the arched windows became pupils of the eyes and the arched entry was a large mouth that seemed to swallow up the captivated crowd with its moans and growls, until it ultimately exploded into fragments of light. Not all of the animations were as elaborate as these but each pulsed with creativity as light became a medium of art for the masses.




And there were masses, particularly the first night. We stopped to see a fireworks display that rivaled anything in DC. The fireworks were shot from a bridge over the Rhone River and people lined up on both sides for as far was we could see. It was quite a spectacle with the whistle and pop of fireworks flying up or out from the bridge and, in one case, flowing down like a waterfall of white light into the river. Smoke filled the air after the 30-40 minute show. We noticed that the Americans in the crowd were gasping and ahhing as fireworks dazzled overhead while the French calmly watched with cameras held overhead to record the scene. The only thing missing was the 1812 Overture!
After the fireworks, we got stuck in a heavy crowd of young and very old, all pushing their way down the wide pedestrian street. Everyone was polite but, I admit, there were points where it was disconcerting. Thankfully, the second night was much less crowded which made for more pleasant strolling through the busy but not packed streets. There are two more days to the Fete but we headed to Strasbourg for their Marche de Noel – one of the best in Europe. More to come on that! For now, we feel fortunate to have reveled in the lights of Lyon.