What it is
The Terreaux sits at the north end of the Presqu'île, where the slopes of the Croix-Rousse begin. The Hôtel de Ville fills its east side and the Palais Saint-Pierre, home of the fine-arts museum, its south. The name is usually traced to a ditch that ran here until the sixteenth century.
The fountain
⭐ The great fountain is by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi — the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty — and it was not made for Lyon. Bartholdi designed it as a young man for a competition in Bordeaux, which never went ahead with it. Finished decades later, it was inaugurated here in 1892: a chariot of four rearing horses, officially titled The rivers and springs flowing to the ocean.
Getting it right
The square is at its best in the evening, with the town hall lit. The cafés on its north side look straight at the fountain.
