What's on in Lyon

The whole city becomes a projection surface — light installations on the cathedral, the Hôtel de Ville, the hill, the parks — while residents line their windowsills with candles in coloured glass, which is the older half of the tradition and the better one. It began on 8 December 1852, when a statue of the Virgin was finally unveiled on Fourvière after months of delay and the city lit its windows spontaneously.

Planning: Well over a million people in a compact centre over four freezing nights. Accommodation books months ahead at multiples of the usual rate, streets and bridges are closed with one-way pedestrian flows, and the last metro is the hard part. Go for it deliberately or avoid that week.

Two months of theatre, music, dance and circus staged in the Roman theatre on the hill — a working festival on 2,000-year-old stone seats, running since 1946.

Planning: Tickets go on sale in the spring and the big names clear fast. It also means the theatre is full of staging and seating rigs through early summer, so a visitor who wants the empty ruin should come outside the festival.

The year's Beaujolais is released at midnight, and Lyon — an hour from the vineyards and the city that drinks most of it — treats the night as a public event, with bars pouring from the stroke of twelve.

Planning: A Wednesday-night-into-Thursday affair rather than a weekend. The wine is young and it is not the point; the room is.

The whole country plays music in the street for one night — professionals on real stages, amateurs on the pavement outside their own front door — and it is free everywhere. It started in France in 1982 and has been exported to a hundred-odd countries since.

A military parade in the morning and fireworks after dark, plus the bals des pompiers — dances held in fire stations on the 13th and 14th, open to anyone and famously good fun.

Buildings that are never open — ministries, private hôtels particuliers, working palaces — open free for two days. It is the one weekend of the year you can walk into the places you normally photograph from the pavement.

Not a festival — the annual shutdown. Bakeries, butchers, family restaurants and small shops close for two or three weeks and put a handwritten note on the door, and cities empty of the people who live in them.

Wooden chalets, vin chaud and regional food, at their oldest and best in Alsace — Strasbourg's dates from 1570 — and now in almost every French city centre.