1. LYON'S TRABOULES
by Andrea Bolitho
March 14, 2012
Saturday afternoon, and the streets of Vieux Lyon, the city’s old town center, are packed with
shoppers and tourists. My guide and I stop by a heavy wooden door, right next to a convenience
store. She taps the code into the keypad, the door swings open and we step from the busy street
into a dark passage, barely three feet wide. As the light comes on, I see that the narrow alley opens
onto an interior courtyard in a 15th-century house. We have suddenly ducked into a different
world. A world of mullioned windows, Gothic galleries, ancient wells, fountains and a spiral
staircase carved out of stone—a miracle of medieval engineering.
Lyon has several of these secret courtyards, stark contrasts between past and present, many of
which can only be reached by one of the city’s distinctive traboules—passageways that cut through
a house or, in the case of the longer traboules, a whole city block, linking one street with another.
If you know where to go, it is possible to walk around the Vieux Lyon and the Croix-Rousse
districts via the traboules, avoiding the crowds—and sheltered from the rain.
Traboules are found in other French cities, but in most cases, unless you happen to live in a house
that has one, you won’t know they are there. Lyon is different. Dozens of its 300 or so traboules
are open to the public, thanks to an innovative agreement between the city council and the
inhabitants of the pertinent buildings. The city bought up many of the properties surrounding the
traboules and made them available as low-cost housing, but with strings attached. Residents
around a traboule must agree to keep it open to the public between 8 am and 7 pm. But like the
traboules themselves, the agreement is a two-way street.Visitors are expected to be quiet, and
respect the fact that the apartments surrounding the fascinating old passages are private homes.
Unfortunately, in some cases the bargain has not been kept—on one side or the other—and now
some of traboules that should be open to the public are accessible only to residents.
Romans to riches
The word traboule comes from the Latin trans ambulare, meaning “to cross”, and the first of
them may have been built as early as the 4th century. As the Roman Empire disintegrated, the
residents of early Lyon—Lugdunum, the capital of Roman Gaul—were forced to move from the
Fourvière hill to the banks of the river Saône when their aqueducts began to fail. The traboules
grew up alongside their new homes, linking the streets that run parallel to the river Saône and
going down to the river itself.
For centuries they were used by people to fetch water from the river and then by craftsmen and
traders to transport their goods. By the 18th century they were invaluable to what had become the
city’s defining industry: textiles, especially silk.
The silk weavers were known as canuts, and their trade changed the face of Lyon forever. (Canut
may derive from canette, a spool for thread.) High-ceilinged houses were built to accommodate
the enormous Jacquard looms, which were some 13 feet tall. On the outskirts of town, Croix-
Rousse—now Lyon’s chic bobo (bourgeois-bohème) district—was originally a working-class area,
home to the majority of the city’s 90,000 silk weavers. They used the traboules to carry their bolts
of silk down to the markets in the new city center on the Presqu’île, the narrow peninsula between
the Rhône and Saône rivers. The covered traboules were the quick way, and had the advantage of
protecting their precious goods from the elements.

2. Wine and war
The authorities were also determined to cut the rate of alcoholism among the workers, and
decided that a carafe of wine would, from then on, contain less wine—although it would remain
the same price.Unsurprisingly, the workers were outraged and apparently gathered one night in a
large traboule courtyard in Croix-Rousse called the Cour des Voraces to claim their rightful, full-
size carafes of Beaujolais. Today the Cour des Voraces is a symbol of Lyon as well as probably its
most spectacular traboule, with three different entrances: the Place Colbert, the Montée Saint
Sébastien and the rue Imbert Colomès. Inside, a plaque reads: “In the Cour des Voraces, hive of
silkwork, canuts struggled for their lives and their dignity.” Like many of the traboules and
interior courtyards in Lyon, it is also a showcase for an impressively complicated stairwell, in this
case an immense six-story set of slanting stairs built of stone from the nearby Mont d’Or hills.
Traboules also played a part in World War II, when Lyon was both a central command point for
the occupying German forces and a stronghold of the Resistance. The dark, shadowy traboules
were perfect boltholes for escaping and hiding from the Gestapo, especially in the early days of the
occupation, when only the Lyonnais knew of their existence. People fleeing from German raids
were able to use them as shortcuts or ways to give their pursuers the slip. In fact the office (more
accurately, one of the offices) of renowned Resistance leader Jean Moulin is just a few steps away
from the exit of a Croix-Rousse traboule, at the Place des Capucins, next to what is now the
Church of Scientology.
La Tour Rose
It’s in Vieux Lyon that you can see the majority of the beautiful interior courtyards that are tucked
away from view. In the 14th and 15th centuries several Lyonnais families made fortunes in the
city’s famous trade fairs. One such family was the Thomassins, who built a splendid hôtel
particulier on the Place du Change in the old town. With its delicate arches and Gothic facade, it is
well worth a visit. But don’t stop there. Squeezed between the mansion and a pharmacy is a hefty,
metal-studded wooden door with a grill at the top. Beyond it lies an interior courtyard once in a
state of complete disrepair but restored over recent years and now complete with mullioned
windows, neo-Gothic crosses and other fancies, galleries and a low, vaulted écurie, a former stable
block.
Among the most famous of Lyon’s not-so-secret passageways is the Traboule de la Tour Rose. The
entire courtyard is painted in pleasing pastel and ochre tones, dominated by an elegant pink
Renaissance watchtower housing a giant spiral staircase with arched windows all the way up. (The
stairs are now off limits to the public.) At the back of the courtyard is the photo gallery and shop
of Frédéric Jean, and it is only thanks to his presence that this traboule remains open, since the
surrounding apartments are not social housing.
La Longue Traboule is, as its name implies, the longest traboule in town. It runs through four
houses in the old town and links the rue du Boeuf with rue Saint Jean, with three separate
courtyards. It is said that, to be a true Lyonnais, you need a working knowledge of the traboules.
There are guided tours, of course, but with a little detective work visitors can find them on their
own. In the Old Town, the most impressive of them are marked with shield-shaped bronze
plaques, while in the Croix-Rousse a lion’s head on a blue background points the way.
Originally published in the February 2012 issue of France Today