The Origins gallery
Dinosaurs, mummies and meteorites in one telling of our beginnings.
Fred Romero from Paris, France — CC BY 2.0 · Florian Fèvre — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jeanne Menjoulet from Paris, France — CC BY 2.0 · SashiRolls — CC BY-SA 4.0
The deliberate mixing: it refuses to separate nature from culture or science from myth, setting them side by side to ask how humans have explained themselves. The result astonishes specialists and entertains people who read not one label — a rare double.
Tram T1 from Perrache nearly to the line's end — fifteen minutes through the new Confluence district, worth watching from the window. Or the summer river shuttle from Vieux Lyon for the finer arrival.
Two hours for the permanent galleries at their pace, three with a temporary show and the roof. Café and outdoor spaces let you break it up — and do not miss the rivers' tip behind the building to finish.
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At the point where Lyon's two rivers — Rhône and Saône — meet stands a building of glass and steel like a metal cloud landed on the water: the Musée des Confluences, Lyon's most ambitious cultural project of this century, a museum of science and civilisations opened in 2014. Its big question is simple: who are we? Its answers fill four permanent galleries mixing what is never usually mixed — dinosaur skeletons with ritual masks, a space capsule with mummies, creation stories of the world's peoples with evolutionary theory — in dark, theatrical staging that turns walking it into an adventure. It is France's most family-successful new museum by a distance — and getting there is an outing itself, by tram through the bold architecture of the new Confluence district.
Dinosaurs, mummies and meteorites in one telling of our beginnings.
Glass and steel afloat on the water — Lyon's new architectural icon.
The land's tip where Rhône meets Saône — the visit's open-air finale.
Darkness and theatrical light that keep children running case to case.
86 Quai Perrache, 69002 Lyon