See Colorful Street Art in Lyon, France

France’s’ third largest city, Lyon, is full of attractions for family travelers, but none is more fascinating to kids than its wall art. Entire buildings are transformed into street scenes or painted so realistically they appear to be something else. Historic figures look from windows and balconies that don’t really exist.

These painted walls are created in a painting technique called trompe-l’œil, or “fool the eye”, imitating a real scene so realistically people do a double-take when passing. Children have tried to pat the furry dog in front of the non-existent Le Pot Beaujolais restaurant on Rue de la Martinière. Across the street, on La Fresque des Lyonnais, a tourist leans out a window to photograph the restaurant, while above her more than two dozen local celebrities from Lyon’s past stand in windows. Look for the Lumière brothers, who invented the first motion picture camera.

Even larger is the most famous of all the trompe-l’œil buildings, Le Mur des Canuts on Boulevard des Canuts, in the Croix-Rouge neighborhood (Canutes were the silk weavers, whose workshops were once here). Covering the entire side of a very ordinary building, the mural turns the space into a street scene so realistic it seems to have captured and frozen an ordinary day of life.

In this imaginary scene, people descend the long flight of steps (such stairways are common in this precipitous neighborhood), stop to take pictures, shop in the stores at the street level – ordinary everyday activities frozen in a moment.

At the left side of the building is a passageway (this one is real) leading to the other side, and along its wall are pictures of the building before the mural and of its subsequent updates. The murals are updated every few years to keep the scene contemporary, and you can follow its changes since 1987.

You’ll find these murals all over Lyon, often disguising plain, dull buildings by giving them elaborate window frames, balconies, faux marble siding and classical architectural details. Not far from La Fresque des Lyonnais and Le Pot Beaujolais, at the corner of rue de la Platière and quai de la Pêcherie, the Mur des Écrivains (wall of writers) transforms a bookstore into a giant bookcase displaying the works of Lyon authors.

Have the kids keep watching for more of these as you tour Lyon, and look more closely at buildings to see if their eyes are being fooled.