Place Bellecour
At 312 metres long and 200 wide, Place Bellecour is simply enormous — one of the largest pedestrian squares in Europe, and the point from which every distance in Lyon is measured. Stand anywhere near the centre and the city opens around you: the red-brick facades to the east and west, the equestrian Louis XIV up on his plinth, and somewhere near the southern end, a small copper boy in a scarf sitting beside an aviator.
That figure is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, born in Lyon in 1900, rendered here alongside the Little Prince he invented. It is easy to walk past the statue in a square this size. Worth not doing so.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who know the square well tend to use it as Lyonnais do: as a meeting point, specifically 'sous la queue du cheval' — under the horse's tail, meaning the Louis XIV statue. The Friday-night roller ride departs from here. In winter, a Ferris wheel goes up near the southern end and an ice rink takes over a section of the terracotta paving.
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How Place Bellecour came to be
The name comes from 'Bella curtis' — a vineyard belonging to the Archbishop of Lyon in the late twelfth century, meaning roughly 'beautiful garden'. For centuries the land was contested, swampy, and largely ignored. In 1604, Henry IV compelled the city council to acquire the pasture and make it a proper public square, though the Archbishop's heirs fought the decision in court for years.
Louis XIV eventually secured ownership in 1708, and the royal architect Robert de Cotte designed the matching facades along the eastern and western edges. A bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV, cast by Martin Desjardins, stood at the centre from 1713 until the Revolution destroyed it in 1793. The current statue, by sculptor François-Frédéric Lemot, was installed in 1825 and completed a full restoration in 2024. The allegorical figures of the Saône and Rhône rivers, made by the Costou brothers in 1720, stood beside it for three centuries before moving to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in 2021.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Lyon summers are warm and largely dry, which makes the open square comfortable from May through September, though the lack of shade means midday in July can feel relentless. Winter brings cold, occasionally foggy days — bearable, and worth it if you want the Ferris wheel and the ice rink.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.