Place des Terreaux and the Bartholdi Fountain

In front of you is Place des Terreaux. Its name recalls that a moat, the 'terralia', closed the city off to the north here until the 16th century. Later it was a market and a place of execution: on 12 September 1642 the Marquis de Cinq-Mars, who had plotted against Richelieu, and his friend François-Auguste de Thou were beheaded here. During the Revolution the guillotine was set up in this square.

1The aldermen's palace

City Hall was built between 1646 and 1672 under the direction of Simon Maupin. A fire damaged it in 1674, and it was later restored by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the architect of Versailles, and Robert de Cotte. On the façade, the relief of Henri IV on horseback dates from 1828.

2The fountain meant for Bordeaux

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was 23 when, in 1857, he won a competition for a fountain in Bordeaux. The city never commissioned it. Thirty years later, by then famous for the Statue of Liberty, he had it cast at his own expense and showed it at the 1889 Paris World's Fair. The mayor of Lyon saw it and bought it: it was unveiled here on 22 September 1892.

It shows a chariot driven by a female figure and pulled by four horses: in the Bordeaux design it symbolised the Garonne and its tributaries rushing to the ocean.

3What to look for

• The horses' hooves: they end in claws.
• The 68 jets in the ground and Daniel Buren's striped pillars, from 1994.
• The Palais Saint-Pierre, a former abbey now the Museum of Fine Arts, to the south.