Where you at? The Lyon edition

I’d be remiss if i didn’t answer my own prompt for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival. I don’t expect anyone to answer the whole quiz, let alone without prior research, but i wanted to have a go at the full twenty questions. So here’s where i’m at.

1. Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap

The Rhône begins its life in the eponymous glacier, near the Gotthard Massif, and flows through Lake Geneva. It reaches Lyon from the north-east, but a few kilometres before the city, the Jonage and Miribel canals split it around the islands of Crépieux-Charmy, forming a 375-hectare well field. The 114 wells on the islands draw from the alluvial aquifer that runs alongside the river. Water pumped from the Old Rhône is spread into infiltration basins to form a barrier protecting the wells from pollution and to maintain the level of the aquifer during dry months.

From there, it’s pumped up to 65 reservoirs and water towers across the metropolis and gravity-fed down to the tap. Crépieux-Charmy supplies about 95% of our water. The rest comes from back-up wells in the Saône’s alluvial aquifer and from Lac des Eaux Bleues in the Miribel-Jonage park, an artificial lake i like to bike around in the springtime. Because the water is filtered by the gravelly soil, with only a single drop of chlorine added every 1,000 litres to keep bacteria at bay, it’s so incredibly full of limescale that i need to filter it with my trusty Aarke Purifier.

2. How many days till the moon is full?

Sixteen. It’ll also be a supermoon: perigee will follow on 25 November at about 359,400 km, so the moon will look marginally bigger than usual, which i defy anyone to notice without a ruler. The current moon phase is displayed on most of my watch faces and on my phone’s lock screen.

3. What soil series are you standing on?

This one was tricky, because France doesn’t do soil series in the USDA sense. I could wax lyrical about the granite and gneiss basement of the Croix-Rousse plateau, the acid acrisols of the western slopes and the marshy alluvium of the right bank, but after two thousand years of continuous human presence, they’re all buried under a thick layer of anthroposol. The southern half of the Presqu’île was reshaped by massive earthworks and archaeologists found the Roman riverside under metres of later ground. (If you’re ever in Lyon, by the way, i highly recommend you visit the Lugdunum museum.)

4. What was the total rainfall in your area last year (July–June)?

Only 746 mm between July 2025 and June 2026, about 9% below the 1991–2020 normal of 821 mm, and this year should be even worse. The rainy season seems to be shifting, with autumn becoming markedly drier and winter becoming wetter, while snow has all but disappeared. This year’s average temperature is on track to be 2 °C higher than the 1991–2020 normal, a number i thought i’d never see in my lifetime.

5. When was the last time a fire burned in your area?

Fortunately, Lyon was spared from the megafires that raged elsewhere in France this summer. That being said, by July, the local fire service had already logged 224 hectares burned around the city against 30 for the whole 2025 season. Lyon’s last big fire was in the late summer of AD 64, a few weeks after the Great Fire of Rome. In his letter On the lesson to be drawn from the burning of Lyon, Seneca claims that “only a single night elapsed between the city at its greatest and the city non-existent”, even though this supposed inferno has left no archaeological trace. The promise that “everything shall be rebuilt better in size and security” than what was lost was good propaganda, at least, and made Emperor Nero look magnanimous.

6. What were the primary subsistence techniques of the culture that lived in your area before you?

Farming, herding and river trade. Before Lucius Munatius Plancus founded Lugdunum in 43 BC, the people on the ground were the Segusiavi, a Gallic people who controlled a vast territory between the Loire and the Saône valleys. Farming at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône rivers is much older than the Gauls. The first agro-pastoral communities settled the plain in the Neolithic and digs have unearthed fourth-millennium hearths, burials and storage pits, with occupation carrying on through the Bronze and Iron Ages.

Lugdunum had been a significant sanctuary for centuries, but under Rome, it was rebuilt as a major colonial capital and military operation centre at the heart of the Via Agrippa road network. Potters, stonemasons, glass- and metalworkers were the pride of the city, which also housed the second imperial mint. The Amphitheatre of the Three Gauls, the theatre, the odeon and countless aqueducts are the last remnants of this glorious past.

7. Name five native edible plants in your region and their season(s) of availability

Wild garlic (allium ursinum), colloquially known as “bear’s garlic”, has to be my favourite. Its fragrant leaves can be harvested in damp woods from March to April, before it flowers, and impart a wonderful flavour to fresh cheeses and salads. Unfortunately, it grows in the same undergrowth as lily of the valley and autumn crocus, which are both toxic.

Stinging nettle (urtica dioica) is best from March to May, when the leaves are tender and zingy. Wild strawberries (fragaria vesca) fruit along woodland edges and are one of the reasons i particularly like to hike between late May and early July. Hazel (corylus avellana) nuts were plentiful from late August to September, but the trees are suffering from the hotter and drier summers. Dog rose (rosa canina) hips are a treat from October to November, even softer and sweeter after the first frosts.

8. From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?

With the Massif Central on one side and the Alps on the other, air gets funnelled north–south along the Rhône corridor. An Atlantic depression often announces itself with strong southerlies, gusting to 60–75 km/h, and leaves with the bise from the north. In the winter, south-westerly weather brings the most rain, but the drier westerlies are more frequent.

9. Where does your garbage go?

The grey bin gets burned. The Metropolis of Lyon runs two incinerators, one south of the city at the Édouard Herriot harbour in Gerland and a second north of the city at Rillieux-la-Pape. Both feed district heating — Gerland alone covers the heating and hot water needs of approximately 120,000 residents. There’s just a tiny problem with this scheme: since 2020, paper, cardboard, plastic and metal should be thrown out in yellow bins to be sorted and recycled at dedicated plants. The incinerators now get only 340,000 tonnes of household waste a year, short of the 390,000 they need, so we’ve had to take in neighbouring city Vienne’s refuse to keep the heating on.

Food scraps go back to the earth. Since 2021, street compost bins have spread across the city. Roughly 100 tonnes a week are shredded, mixed with wood chips and left to rot for about 6 weeks. Food was a third of the grey bin, but 80% of the compost is now sold to farmers within 30 km of the city centre. Old clothes are collected to be sold in charity shops or, if they’re too worn, to be recycled as thermal insulation. More than 80% of glass containers are recycled thanks to the 2,700 street containers peppered around the city.

10. How long is the growing season where you live?

About 7 months between frosts, from early April to late October. This year ran long, from 28 March to 4 November. Lyon lost about 10 frost days a year between the 1981–2010 and 1991–2020 normals. By the other usual definition, days averaging above 5 °C, you get about 10 months between February and November.

11. On what day of the year are the shadows the shortest where you live?

On the summer solstice, at solar noon (roughly 100 minutes after the clock’s noon in Lyon). This is true for all temperate and polar zones, while in the tropics, a zero-shadow day happens twice a year when the sun passes directly overhead.

12. When do the deer rut in your region, and when are the young born?

The local deer is the roe deer, which ruts in high summer, from mid-July to mid-August. The roe deer is the only even-toed hoofed mammal with delayed implantation. The fertilized embryo enters a state of dormancy until around December or January, which means the fawns arrive in spring rather than in the dead of winter. I seldom see deer when hiking around the city, but during rut, you can often spot the “witches’ ring” that bucks leave in the vegetation while chasing does in circles. When i was living in the countryside, we knew summer was coming to a close when we heard the chirpy barks of the roe deer and, a little later, the deep roar of the red deer in rut.

13. Name five grasses in your area. Are any of them native?

You’ll find dense tussocks of barnyard grass (dactylis glomerata) on every untended and ‘rewilded’ patch of land, while perennial ryegrass (lolium perenne) is the backbone of manicured lawns and sport pitches. The upright brome (bromus erectus) is the dominant grass of the limestone slopes north of the city and the calcareous terraces of Miribel-Jonage. As soon as you leave the tidy embankments of the city centre, the banks of the Rhône are rife with long beds of common reed (phragmites australis) where birds nest. Johnson grass (sorghum halepense), a tall perennial with stubborn rhizomes native to Asia and northern Africa, is spreading up the Rhône valley as the climate warms. On my own balcony, i planted two species from Japan, the striped carex oshimensis and the vibrant red imperata cylindrica ‘Red Baron’.

14. Name five resident and five migratory birds in your area

As every self-respecting man closing in on 40 is wont to do, i’ve added bird-watching to my long list of hobbies. Apart from the usual pigeons, crows and magpies, my favourite residents are:

• the Eurasian coot (fulica atra), which is the best-designed bird of all, and often rubs wings with mallards (anas platyrhynchos) and mute swans (cygnus olor);
• the fat goosanders (mergus merganser) at Miribel-Jonage;
• the kingfishers fishing in the dead arms of the Rhône;
• the few pairs of peregrine falcons (falco peregrinus) that have taken up residence in nest boxes installed on the Silex² office tower, the metallic tower of Fourvière and the Rillieux-la-Pape water tower;
• and the humble house sparrow (passer domesticus).

Migratory birds are rarer in the city, unless you count the common starling (sturnus vulgaris), whose mesmerizing murmurations explode when northern and eastern birds fly in the autumn. Still, you can encounter:

• the alpine swift (tachymarptis melba) in growing numbers between March and October;
• the common swift (apus apus) in the same period, but declining nationally;
• the beautiful black kite (milvus migrans) which arrives in a rush in early spring and leaves as soon as the young fledge;
• the flamboyant European bee-eater (merops apiaster) in the sandbanks of Miribel-Jonage;
• and the common tern (sterna hirundo) which comes back in April after having wintered in Africa.

Wherever you live, i highly recommend you install the Merlin Bird ID app, a kind of Shazam for birds developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

15. What is the land use history of where you live?

Marsh and farmland slowly turned into city in stages. For 1,700 years, Lyon mostly stayed on the Saône side. The meadows across the Rhône were regularly flooded until dams were built and the Rhône was diverted in the 1760s. Jean-Antoine Morand was instrumental in the eastward expansion of the city, while Antoine-Michel Perrache pushed the confluence south by draining the marshes that separated the Mogniat island to the Presqu’île.

The floods of 1840 and 1856 swept away hundreds of rammed-earth houses on the left bank, leading to the construction of huge embankments that secured Lyon’s development during the 20th century. I live in a street that didn’t exist 20 years ago and yet is steeped in history — here are the train tracks that fuelled and still fuel Lyon’s economic growth, there are the last traces of the birth of the global automotive industry, and everywhere you can find proof that Lyon is still a military town.

16. What primary ecological event/process influenced the land form where you live? (Bonus special: what’s the evidence?)

Glaciation and the rivers that drained it. During the Riss glaciation, roughly 140,000 years ago, the Rhône glacier pushed as far as Lyon and dropped its moraine on the Croix-Rousse plateau. The evidence is a rock, the Gros Caillou, a 24-tonne block of Triassic quartzite that was excavated in 1890 during the drilling of the funicular tunnel and now sits at the east end of the Boulevard de la Croix-Rousse. Its nearest matching outcrops are in the Maurienne and Tarentaise, in the Alps, at least 200 km away.

17. What species have become extinct in your area?

The apron (zingel asper) was first described by famous naturalist Guillaume Rondelet, in 1555, as a fish that was popular “between Lyon and Vienne”. At the time, people liked to joke that this small perch-like fish subsisted on gold, because it foraged in silt that sometimes contained auriferous sand. Its range has shrunk more than 80% in a century and only four populations remain far from Lyon. In general, the extensive engineering and damming of the Rhône for hydroelectricity, flood control and commercial navigation have significantly altered the ecology of the river.

The mammals (fortunately?) tell the opposite story. The wolf has returned near the city after more than a century of absence and a pack seems to have settled since this summer in the neighbouring Pilat massif. The lower Rhône was one of the last refuges of the beaver in France, and after a pioneering 1909 hunting ban and multiple translocation programs, beavers have completely recolonized the urban centre of Lyon. It’s pretty incredible to see them fell trees on the quays of Gerland next to the industrial harbour!

18. What are the major plant associations in your region?

Three sets of plants meet in Lyon: riverside trees (willow, poplar, alder) and wetlands along the Rhône, dry grassland and downy oak woods in the calcareous hills, and acid broadleaf woods (oak, sweet chestnut) on the crystalline hills to the west. That’s why Miribel-Jonage’s designation as a protected Natura 2000 zone is so important — it keeps the rare remnants of what the river was like before engineering, including wetlands and grasslands.

19. From where you’re reading this, point north

In my office, at my dining table or in bed, i’m facing south. On the couch, i’m facing north. I don’t think it affects my writing. It’s easy to orient yourself in Lyon, because the Fourvière basilica overlooks pretty much the whole city from its western vantage point.

20. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom where you live?

The lesser celandine (ficaria verna) covers park lawns, hedge banks and riverside woods with yellow stars from March, sometimes late February, for 3 or 4 weeks. I’m partial to the sweet violet (viola odorata), which peaks at woodland edges from mid-February. With milder and milder winters, the first bloom keeps creeping earlier, with buds breaking 2 weeks to a full month ahead of schedule!