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The festival of lights takes place in Lyon every year on the night of 8 December, when the city dresses in its finest lights to put on a show without equal.

Tradition has it that every family in Lyon keeps its lumignons — an assortment of thick, sometimes coloured glasses, each holding a candle — and that on the evening of 8 December the candles are lit and the glasses set along the windowsills. Since the 1990s the spontaneous festival has been joined by shows commissioned by the city and created by designers of national and international renown. The Festival of Lights now reaches every district, and puts surprising displays of light all across the city.

It was in 1643, during an outbreak of the plague, that the city of Lyon placed itself under the protection of the Virgin: the notables, the aldermen and the provost of merchants vowed to pay her homage every year if the plague ceased. A solemn procession has gone from the cathedral of Saint-Jean up to the basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière every year since, on 8 September, the day the city was consecrated to the Virgin.

In 1852, a statue of the Virgin Mary raised on the chapel on the hill of Fourvière was to have been unveiled on 8 September, but a flood of the Saône stopped the ceremony taking place. It was put back to 8 December, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, and it was then that the people of Lyon, of their own accord, lit up their windows for the first time on the evening of 8 December.