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.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Parc de la Chapelle, 18 Rue de la Chapelle, 69009 Lyon
You can recognise it by its size, 6.35 metres round and 28 metres tall with a crown spreading 32. The park's lawn and paths are laid out around it rather than the other way round.
10 min walk from Gorge de Loup station
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.