What it is
Designed by the brothers Denis and Eugène Bühler, the park opened in 1857 — exactly the same year as Central Park in New York. It covers 117 hectares beside the Rhône and is one of the largest urban parks in France.
It grew as it went: the great glasshouses in 1865, the collection glasshouses in 1899, the monument on the Île aux Cygnes after the First World War, the rose garden in the 1960s.
What is in it
A lake with boats, a zoo and a botanical garden, the glasshouses, the rose garden, and space enough that it never feels full. It is where Lyon goes on a Sunday.
Getting it right
Come by the Brotteaux side, walk the lake, and leave by the north entrance toward the Cité Internationale — or simply stay. See When to Come for the seasons.
The legend of the golden head
In 1530 the land belonged to the Lambert family and was already called the Tête d'Or, the golden head. The name comes from a legend that a treasure, including a golden head of Christ, had been buried here by barbarians or crusaders. People believed it enough to dig: searches went on until 1860, and nothing was ever found. Until the park was made, this was flood land of dead arms of the Rhône and marshes, known locally as brotteaux.
Nature for those who have none
A public park for Lyon was planned as early as 1812, and in 1845 the architect Christophe Crépet proposed turning the scrub of the Tête d'Or into a wood like the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. The idea was taken up by Claude-Marius Vaïsse, prefect and mayor from 1853 to 1864, who wanted, in his words, to give nature to those who have none. The city bought the land from the Hospices Civils de Lyon in 1856, and the Swiss landscape designers Denis and Eugène Bühler, with the engineer Gustave Bonnet, spent five years building it. A dike built partly with earth dug out for the lake protected the grounds from floods.
The botanical garden moved here in 1857 from the slopes of the Croix-Rousse, where it had been founded under a revolutionary decree, with more than 4,000 plants; it was placed on the east side so as not to spoil the view across the great lawn south of the lake. Today its living collections, spread over seven hectares, rival those of the national natural history museum in Paris. Boating on the lake began in 1861, the same year the first animals arrived, from sheep, hens and cows toward the exotic species that turned into today's zoo.
A park that kept growing
The great glasshouses were built in 1865 by Gustave Bonnet and rebuilt from 1877 to 1880; the Victoria glasshouse followed in 1887, and the collection, crop and palm houses in 1899. The park hosted Lyon's international exhibitions of 1872 and 1894. In 1891 cars were allowed to drive through it; after several accidents, Mayor Antoine Gailleton required every vehicle to carry a plate with a unique number, a rule later extended to the whole city. Until 1894 the boundary between Lyon and Villeurbanne ran right through the park, and the two towns argued constantly over its costs until a law gave the whole park to Lyon.
The fence came in 1896–1898, partly to stop smugglers using the cover of the trees to slip goods past the city's customs line; opponents tore down more than three hundred meters of it in 1898. The main gate, the Porte des Enfants du Rhône, was designed by Charles Meysson and made by the Lyon ironworker and anarchist Joseph Bernard. It is thirty-two meters long, its central gate eleven meters high, and the whole weighs fifty-eight tonnes.
Later additions
Tony Garnier built a cowshed here in 1904. New lion cages opened in 1917, a tunnel to the Île aux Cygnes in 1932, and the war memorial on that island was built between 1914 and 1930. The new rose garden was laid out from 1961 to 1964, and the elephant enclosure followed in 1964. In 1989 a space for human rights was created in the northern part of the park, with standing stones carrying the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The park covers 117 hectares with eight entrances, the newest opened in 2009 on the side of the Cité Internationale.
The zoo today
The zoo has changed a great deal. An African plain was created in 2006–2007 under the landscape architect Jacqueline Osty, and an Asian forest for endangered species of Southeast Asia between 2019 and 2021. Some of the old large animals are gone: the last two elephants left in 2013 for Roc Agel, a Grimaldi family property in the Alpes-Maritimes, the last lion died in 2021 and was not replaced, and in 2022 the last crocodiles were flown to Morocco so that their young could be returned to the wild. Pony rides ended in 2023. The park itself is laid out in the English style, a triangle of rolling lawns and woods, bordered by a dike along the Rhône with a promenade on top.
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