Fête des Lumières

This past weekend I went East to Lyon for their annual Fête des Lumières or Festival of Lights, no relation to Moses. I stayed with my friend Sarah who I visited last year in Lyon for a weekend as well. This year she insisted I come to see this particular festival.

Basically it consists of upwards of one hundred light installations all over the city - in 3 nights of roaming the city from when it got dark around 6pm until it ended at 2am I still didn't see it all. It is funded by the city with the help of some private sponsoring and the installations are mainly Lyonnais artists.

 The exhibits took on all different forms as the goal is just to use light in creative ways. A lot of the time this took the form of projecting light shows onto the facades of important buildings accompanied by instrumental music - cathedrals, theaters, town hall, etc. This was one of the most popular at the Place des Terreaux where there is a large fountain of 4 horses and a woman - the show essentially animated the story of the fountain. Then there was this one that turned the Théatre de Célestins into a giant pinball machine. There were tons of other kinds set up in different places in the city - parks, fountains, trees, etc. this was one of my favorites.


I felt like I was in Harry Potter walking the narrow cobblestone streets of the old city center with all kinds of whimsical light shows visible from everywhere and people selling hot wine every few meters, it was a very cool experience.

As touristy as it was in the sense that between 3 and 4 million people descend on Lyon for this weekend, I felt like it hadn't become a touristy attraction.I really liked how the installations changed depending on the neighborhood you were in to kind of highlight the spirit of the different areas of the city, and how featured the local artists were. They also had many exhibits that were designed by school kids and realised by aritsts. One evening Sarah and I had wandered around the packed center, and the climbed up to Croix-Rousse, the hippier younger neighborhood to see what they had going on. We stumbled upon a guy with a microphone infront of a bed sheet strung up between 2 tree telling a story to a crowd seated on the ground in front of him. Behind him, shadow puppets animated what he said. All around him in the trees were illuminated animals made from paper mâché. You could tell it was the last show of the night as his comrads behind him often took of into their own rendition of the story and he frequently had to pause to put them back on track. The fact that there was pot of steaming hot wine within reach I'm sure didn't help. It was very amusing.