We flew from Barcelona to Lyon, France yesterday. We are actually here for an event that is happening on Monday the 25th, which I will discuss later in the week.

Though D and I both love France, we had never thought to visit Lyon. A pity, as we discovered today when we strolled through town on a self-guided tour with the help of an audio-guide that we borrowed from the tourism office.

Lyon was a part of the Roman Empire, known to the Romans as Lugdunum. Today, the Roman amphitheatre still sits on the hill above Lyon, called “La Fourvière”. The city also encompasses “Vieux Lyon”, which is the area that dates from the medieval days, as well as the “Croix-Rousse” area, where silk workers lived and worked in the 1800s (Lyon was once a city renowned for its silk industry).

Lyon is the third largest city in France after Paris and Marseille. The rivers Saône and Rhône run through it, converging towards the southern part of the city, making the central part a peninsula.

When we were taking our audio-guide tour of Vieux Lyon, we stopped at a door on a certain street, just as the audio-guide instructed. We were surprised when we were told to open the door and walk through..wasn’t it someone’s home?

To our great surprise, the door opened into a long, covered alley between two buildings. The alley ended with another door, on the other side of which was the street parallel to the one from which we had come. These covered alleys, called “les traboules”, date back to the medieval days, and allowed people to quickly move from street to street. They were shortcuts. The old buildings that are linked by traboules are now private homes and businesses, of course, so the city enacted a law that states that the traboules must remain accessible to the public while the private areas of the buildings may be locked.

I was so delighted by the traboules that I wanted to find them all and waltz through them! They felt like Lyon’s secret.