Keeping Cool with Culture in Lyon

Published: September 3, 2025 by Paul StJohn Mackintosh

With summer temperatures soaring and a warm early fall, the city of Lyon found a way to keep the city’s visitors and inhabitants cool and safe.

Travel headlines have been filled lately with alarming reports of the heatwaves in southern Europe and their devastating consequences. Lyon, with due care for the safety and comfort of its visitors – and residents – responded with a new and generous way to be cool: free access to selected public museums.

As part of its 2025 range of policies to deal with the summer heat, “Objectif fraîcheur” (Objective Cool), France’s second city threw open the doors of three of its major museums: the Musée des Beaux-Arts (Museum of Fine Arts), the Musée Gadagne, and the Musée d’Art Contemporain (Museum of Contemporary Art).

Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon © shutterstock

Selected partly thanks to their efficient air conditioning, these museums conveniently happen to be among Lyon’s top tourism destinations. The Musée Gadagne in particular, is at the heart of the picturesque Vieux Lyon district, and contains the Musée d’Histoire de Lyon (Museum of the History of Lyon) and the Musée des Marionnettes du monde (World Puppet Museum), while the Musée des Beaux-Arts opens right off Lyon’s monumental Place des Terreaux. Both are easily reached by public transport.

Free opening was also to be extended to Musée Lugdunum (formerly known as the Gallo-Roman Museum of Lyon-Fourvière or Museum of Roman Civilisation), the museum of Lyon’s remarkable Roman past, next to its Cyclopean Roman monuments. 

The policy was originally planned to be activated after ten days of an orange heatwave alert, and on the first day of a red alert. In practice, temperatures edged close to or topping 40°C regularly. With a red alert in effect from 11 August, following similar temperatures earlier in the summer, the last heatwave brought record temperatures across the Rhône region, with stifling nights that bring little relief. 

The gardens of the Musée Gadagne © shutterstock

Other policies put in place by the city to combat the heat include late opening for shadier public parks, free refills of water bottles at selected shops and outlets, later hours for public swimming pools and water parks, and a map of places to keep cool. I wrote this article under the shade of a tree by a fountain in the city’s central Place Bellecour. 

Aside from free access to their collections, both the Musée Gadagne and the Musée des Beaux-Arts have attractive options for keeping cool – accessible for free at any time. The Musée des Beaux-Arts has its shady courtyard, overlooked by its café with an open-air balcony, and the Musée Gadagne has its historic roof garden, complete with free deckchairs. 
As global warming pushes temperatures high, and summer drags on, we’re bound to see more of this kind of initiative and similar policies.