Lyon keeps a formal, published list of its remarkable trees: four carry the national Arbre Remarquable label, and one park holds the collective Ensemble Arboré Remarquable label for its whole 8,800-tree collection. That park, the Tête d'Or, exists because 19th century Lyonnais wanted a green space to rival Paris's Bois de Boulogne, and two Swiss brothers gave them one with species from four continents. What survives elsewhere is quieter: a giant chestnut in a half-wild park, a cedar on a Saône island where monks gardened for a thousand years, an oak collection planted the year before the First World War.
0 / 13 visitados en Lyon
Foto: Julien Lepage (CC BY)
1
The Pin de Bunge, or Pin de Napoléon
Lacebark Pine (Pinus bungeana) · approximately 170 years · 6th arrondissement
This pine's bark peels in patches of grey, green and cream as it ages, a trait so distinctive that the species barely needs its Latin name to identify it. Pinus bungeana is native to central China, first documented for Western science by the Russian botanist Alexander von Bunge in 1831 at a temple garden in Beijing, and this specimen was probably planted in 1856, the year construction began on the Parc de la Tête d'Or itself, making it one of the park's original plantings rather than a later addition. The International Dendrology Society's own reference site names it directly as the oldest cultivated Pinus bungeana in Europe, calling it a national treasure of the Lyon botanical garden, a specific claim rather than a vague superlative, and one this project treats as credible given the source. Locally it carries the nickname Pin de Napoléon, though no source connects the name to any specific historical event rather than general period association, so that link is not claimed here as fact. Nearly 170 years on, its trunk has developed the pale, almost white patchwork bark that only develops with real age, the single feature that makes this pine worth seeking out among the arboretum's thousands of other specimens.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
Foto: Krzysztof Golik (CC BY 4.0)
2
The Osage Orange of the Tête d'Or
Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) · over 100 years · 6th arrondissement
This tree's American ancestors were weapons before they were shade. Maclura pomifera is named for the Osage nation of the central United States, who prized its wood, dense, springy and rot-resistant, for war bows and arrows above almost any other timber available to them. The species reached Europe in 1823, and French growers in the south of the country initially planted it not for its odd, wrinkled, inedible fruit but as living fencing and, briefly, as a food source for silkworms before mulberry proved more practical. This specimen in the Tête d'Or's arboretum has grown into something closer to a specimen tree than a hedge: a dendrologist's survey put its girth at 3.70 metres a metre above the ground, with a trunk described as ridged and hollowed over some two metres of its height, reasonably read as the marks of a genuinely old, over-a-century specimen rather than a fast-growing recent planting. Osage orange also spreads by layering, sending down roots wherever a low branch touches soil, so what looks like one tree in a dense stand may in places be a single genetic individual repeating itself.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
3
The Bald Cypress of the Tête d'Or
Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum) · undated, mature specimen · 6th arrondissement
This tree grows as though it remembers the Louisiana wetlands its species comes from, even landlocked in a Lyon park more than eight thousand kilometres away. Taxodium distichum is one of the few conifers that sheds its needles every autumn, and where it grows in standing water, it sends up woody knees, called pneumatophores, that poke above the surface to bring oxygen to submerged roots, a trait this specimen displays even without the flooded ground its Gulf Coast relatives depend on. A dendrological survey recorded its girth at 5.45 metres a metre above ground and its height at just over 30 metres, among the largest measured trees anywhere in the park's arboretum, with a deeply fluted, buttressed trunk in excellent health. No source gives it a specific planting date, so its age is estimated here from the park's own founding in the 1850s rather than documented directly, but a tree of this size, in a species not known for exceptionally fast growth, is a serious candidate for one of the arboretum's oldest original plantings.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
4
The Giant Chestnut of Parc de la Garde
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · undated, called a giant specimen · Champvert, 5th arrondissement
Most visitors to this park come for the wildness rather than any single tree, but the chestnut at its centre is the reason locals bother naming the place at all. Parc de la Garde keeps a half-forested character unusual for a Lyon city park: its lower half is genuinely wooded, criss-crossed by informal paths, and holds a small stone bridge that once carried the old Vaugneray tramway line through the woods before the route was abandoned. The horse chestnut standing among these trees has been formally recognised with France's national Arbre Remarquable label, described locally simply as an enormous trunk carrying multiple large branches, a scale that marks it out even among the park's other mature trees. No source gives the tree an individual age or measured girth beyond that general description, so any figure here is an estimate rather than a documented record. The label itself, rather than any dramatic history, is what distinguishes this specimen from the thousands of ordinary horse chestnuts planted across French parks in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
5
The Japanese Pagoda Tree of Parc de Gerland
Japanese Pagoda Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum) · undated · Gerland, 7th arrondissement
Gerland is one of Lyon's newer large parks by name, built out on former industrial and marshland south of the city centre and reworked repeatedly through the 20th century, so a tree old enough to carry a national remarkable-tree label stands out by contrast with almost everything else growing around it. In 2024 the A.R.B.R.E.S. association added this Japanese pagoda tree to its national list, formally measuring it at 16 metres tall with an 18 metre crown spread and a trunk 302 centimetres around at chest height, figures precise enough to track any future growth or decline against. Despite the common name, the species is native to China rather than Japan, introduced to Europe in the 18th century and prized since for flowering late in summer when few other large trees are still blooming, a trait that makes it valuable to bees and other pollinators after the main spring flush has finished. No individual planting date is documented, so the tree's age is estimated here from its measured size rather than a verified record, but the label recognition alone marks it as one of the more significant individual trees in a 40 hectare park built mainly for sport and recreation rather than horticulture.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
6
The Atlas Cedar of Parc de la Chapelle
Atlas Cedar (Cedrus atlantica) · locally claimed at 500 years, botanically disputed · Champvert, 9th arrondissement
This cedar is effectively the reason the park around it exists in its current shape: much of Parc de la Chapelle is built around a single enormous specimen, with the site's open lawn and paths arranged to give the tree room rather than the other way around. Measured at 28 metres tall with a 32 metre crown spread and a trunk 6.35 metres around, it received France's national Arbre Remarquable label on 16 October 2024, and city sources describe it as multi-centenary, some putting a figure of around 500 years on it directly. That number sits awkwardly against the species' own history: Cedrus atlantica, native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and Algeria, was not introduced into French cultivation until the 1840s, which would make a genuinely 500-year-old specimen growing in a Lyon park difficult to reconcile with any documented planting. The claim is stated here as what it is, a locally repeated figure rather than a settled fact, alongside the tree's real, independently confirmed scale and its 2024 national label. Whatever its true age, it is locally described as possibly the largest Atlas cedar in Lyon, and its branches shelter birds and squirrels in a quiet residential corner of the 9th arrondissement.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
7
The Oak Collection of Parc de la Cerisaie
Mixed species (1913 hillside park) · undated, park designed 1913 · Croix-Rousse, 4th arrondissement
This park takes its name from a cherry orchard that no longer exists, replaced just before the First World War by a very different planting scheme. Landscape architect René-Edouard André, son of the more famous Édouard André whose formal garden style shaped parks across France and beyond, designed Parc de la Cerisaie in 1913 on the Croix-Rousse hillside, centring the roughly 1,200-tree planting on a significant oak collection alongside birches, yews and beeches. That timing puts the park's founding trees at just over a century old today, planted the year before the war that would go on to reshape the neighbourhood and the city around them. No individual tree in the collection carries a separately documented age or measurement, so the range given here describes the park's own founding date rather than any single named specimen, consistent with how this project treats other undated group plantings. What survives is less a single monumental tree than a coherent, deliberately designed early 20th century woodland, unusually intact for a century-old civic planting scheme.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
Foto: PHILDIC (CC BY-SA 3.0)
8
The Garden Trees of Jardin des Chartreux
Mixed species (Croix-Rousse hillside garden) · undated · Croix-Rousse, 4th arrondissement
This garden sits on the steep slope between the Croix-Rousse plateau and the Saône, on ground once attached to a Carthusian monastery that gave the neighbourhood its name and that disappeared, like most French religious houses of its kind, during the Revolution. What remains today is a public garden of broad lawns and mature trees, magnolia, cedar and horse chestnut among the species named in descriptions of the site, arranged to take advantage of a genuinely striking view over the Saône quays and the hills of Fourvière on the opposite bank. No individual tree here has a documented planting date or measurement, and no single specimen is singled out by name the way the labelled trees elsewhere on this list are, so this entry describes the garden's mature tree cover as a group rather than claiming one named champion. The steep terrain that makes the view worthwhile also keeps the garden genuinely quiet, a local rather than a tourist destination, reached by a climb up from the river that most visitors to Lyon never make.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
9
The Cappadocian Maple of the Tête d'Or
Cappadocian Maple (Acer cappadocicum) · undated, mature specimen · 6th arrondissement
This maple comes from a stretch of the world most visitors to a French municipal park have never had reason to think about: the mountain forests running from the Caucasus through northern Iran and on toward the Himalayas, where Acer cappadocicum grows wild among beech and oak. Lyon's botanical garden, folded into the Tête d'Or since 1857, was built to hold exactly this kind of geographic range, species chosen for scientific and educational value as much as for looks. A dendrological survey of the park recorded this specimen's girth at 3.20 metres a metre above ground and its height at 26 metres, respectable rather than record-breaking figures next to the arboretum's largest specimens, but enough to mark it as a genuinely mature, long-established tree rather than a recent planting. No individual planting date is documented, so its age is estimated here from its measured size and the arboretum's own founding period rather than a verified record. In autumn its leaves turn a clean, even yellow, a display Cappadocian maples are specifically valued for in cultivation, though no source dates this specimen's colour peak precisely enough to state a reliable calendar window here.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
10
The Pedunculate Oak of Rue Viret
Pedunculate Oak (Quercus robur) · not documented · Villeurbanne (Les Poulettes, adjoining Gratte-Ciel), roughly 1.4 km east of Parc de la Tete d'Or
Villeurbanne's official tree register calls this pedunculate oak rare, and it means it plainly: street plantings here run to plane and lime, so a full-grown Quercus robur on a residential corner stands out as an exception the city itself has flagged. The 2017 survey that logged it recorded good health and real size and nothing else, no planting date, no measured age, just a note that this one was worth watching. An investigative piece on Lyon's remarkable trees found it again in 2025, still standing at the same corner of Rue Viret and Rue Francis de Pressense, eight years on from that first record. It grows a fifteen minute walk from the Art Deco tower blocks of Gratte-Ciel, Villeurbanne's landmark 1930s housing project, in the quieter grid of streets just west of it. Nobody has measured its trunk or dated its rings, so this page will not guess a number rather than invent one. What two independent records agree on is simpler: an oak grown too large and too old to belong on an ordinary street, still there, still worth the detour from the park at the Tete d'Or.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
11
The Anne Frank Chestnut
Horse Chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) · planted December 2014, about 12 years old · Part-Dieu, 3rd arrondissement
This chestnut is not old. It is barely twelve, planted at the centre of Place Marc-Aron in December 2014 to replace a statue called Renaissance that the square's renovation had removed. What makes it worth a stop is where it comes from: it is a cutting from the horse chestnut Anne Frank could see through the attic window of her hiding place in Amsterdam, the tree she described in her diary as one of the only things connecting her to the outside world.
That original tree fell in a storm on 23 August 2010. Before it went, the Anne Frank Foundation had already taken roughly 150 cuttings and sent saplings to institutions and public spaces worldwide, Washington DC, Jerusalem and Paris among them, so the tree from the diary kept growing in dozens of places after the original one did not. Lyon's arrived on rue Moncey in a public ceremony and now stands in a small square two minutes' walk from Place Guichard metro station, marked by nothing more than its own planting.
It will not be Lyon's oldest or largest tree for a very long time, maybe not ever. It is here because of what it descends from rather than what it has personally witnessed, the one entry on this list whose whole story predates its own roots.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
12
The Plane Tree of Place Antoine-Rivoire
London Plane (Platanus x acerifolia) · planted 1894, about 132 years old · Cordeliers, 2nd arrondissement
Lyon's street-tree database holds over 100,000 records, and barely more than half of them carry a planting date at all. Of the ones that do, this plane is the oldest: put in the ground in 1894, at the centre of a square barely bigger than a tennis court in the heart of the Presqu'ile. A city forestry official is on record saying plainly that none of Lyon's plane trees reach the three or four centuries some regional specimens do, so call this the oldest dated tree in the city's records rather than its oldest tree outright.
The square itself has buried more history than its tree has years. From the 16th century until the French Revolution it was the parish cemetery of Saint-Nizier, the church that still stands two streets over. The Revolution cleared the cemetery, and the square that replaced it was called Place de la Fromagerie until 1934, when it was renamed for Antoine Rivoire, a founder of Lyon's trade fair and tourism board.
The plane tree stands alone at the centre of it now, at the junction of four small streets, on ground that spent three centuries as a burial ground before anyone planted anything there at all.
Leer más y cómo llegar →
13
The Cedar of Square Gabrielle Dupond-Ebrard
Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) · Point du Jour, Lyon 5th arrondissement
The square's namesake hid people from the Gestapo two streets from here. Gabrielle Dupond-Ebrard lived at 13 avenue du Point du Jour until 1985, working with the Combat resistance network under Pierre Guillain de Benouville, and her house served as a secretariat and shelter for refugees during the German occupation. Lyon later named this small square after her, and the cedar growing in it now outranks almost everything else about the place: a local streets guide calls it simply the square's main feature.
Nobody has measured it. The city's own register of remarkable trees lists it only as a very large specimen, with no planting year and no girth on file, unusual for a species normally easy to date from its own architecture. Cedar of Lebanon grows a tiered, almost horizontal branch structure as it ages, each level wider than the one above it, so the size the register does record is at least visible rather than guessed.
The square sits about 450 metres from the giant chestnut of Parc de la Garde, already on this list, so the two make an easy pair on the same walk through Point du Jour. If you know how old this cedar is, or can get a tape around the trunk, tell us.
Leer más y cómo llegar →