Skate Spots in Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux
City Guides ·
339 mapped spots across three French cities that aren't Paris, with the geography that explains why each one skates the way it does.
Lyon has 160 spots on our map. Berlin has 119. Nobody plans a trip to Lyon.
Add Marseille's 102 and Bordeaux's 77 and you get 339 spots across three cities that, between them, probably get a hundredth of the trip planning Paris does. Paris has 438, which is a real number and a real reason to go. It is not a reason to skip everything below the Loire.
The three cities do not skate alike, and the reason is geography. Lyon sits on a narrow tongue of land between two rivers. Marseille is a port wedged into hills and spread over three times the ground. Bordeaux is flat and small enough to cross on a board in half an hour. Each of those facts shows up in the spot data.
Lyon: two rivers and the strip between them
The Rhône and the Saône run parallel through Lyon and meet at the southern tip of the city. Everything historic is on the Presqu'île, the peninsula between them, which is maybe 800 metres wide. Compression like that does strange things to a spot map.
Here is the clearest example. Of Lyon's 17 shop entries, 15 sit within 280 metres of WallStreet Skateshop on Rue de la Platière. Namaste is at the same street number. DC Shoes and Carhartt Lyon are both on Rue Lanterne, 34 metres apart. Vans Lyon, Element Lyon, Wesc and Le Cri Du Kangourou are all inside the same five-minute walk. Only ABS Lyon and Bros Bike Store sit outside it. Some of those 17 are duplicate entries for the same store, so treat the count as roughly a dozen real businesses in one dense block. That is still a lot of skate retail for a city of half a million.
The most photographed spot in the city by a wide margin is Hotel De Ville, on Place Louis Pradel, with 100 photos in the database. Second is Foch at Pont Morand with 73. Both are on the Presqu'île, a few hundred metres apart. If you only get one evening, that is where it goes.
South of there the peninsula narrows to the actual confluence, and the whole district was rebuilt as new-architecture Confluence in the last twenty years. That means fresh concrete and no history of being skated out. Skatepark de Confluence, Confluence, Cube Orange, Darse and Cours Bayard are strung along a 700-metre stretch of Quai Rambaud and the streets behind it.
Then there are the hills, because the Presqu'île has two of them. Croix-Rousse rises to the north, and the spots up there are stepped and awkward in the way hill spots always are: Mur des Canuts, La Grande Cote, Marches Place Bertone. Gerland, flat and industrial in the far south, is the opposite: Skatepark de Gerland has 47 photos, and Halle Tony Garnier and Jonas Salk ledges are within a few hundred metres of it. Twelve of Lyon's spots are parks, including Skatepark Blandan and the riverside Berges du Rhone. The full list is on the Lyon page.
Marseille: a map fourteen kilometres tall
Marseille's mapped spots span roughly 14 km north to south and 14 km east to west. Lyon's span about 9 by 7. That is not a rounding difference. It is three times the ground, and it changes how you skate the city: Marseille is not a place you walk between spots, it is a place you pick a district and stay there.
The centre is the exception. Around the Panier and Rue du Vieux Palais there are 18 spots inside a 450-metre radius, including Stairs, curbs on Rue Sainte-Barbe, Colbert (14 photos), Bench + set of 4 on Place des Grands Carmes and Arc de Triomphe at Place Jules Guesde. Walk 400 metres west and you are at the water, where Parvis St Laurent and Stairs sit on the Esplanade de la Tourette and La Major is on Boulevard Jacques Saade. The most photographed street spot in the city, Mairie de Marseille with 25 photos, is in the same area, and La Plaine and Cours Julien are up the hill behind it.
The hills matter more here than anywhere else in the three cities. Marseille has a local word for the streets that cut across a slope, the *traverse*, and the northern districts are full of them and full of spots: Traverse de Gibraltar, Traverse du Progrès, Notre Dame de Bon Secours, 13 Habitat, Roof Gap, Gymnase Sinoncelli. That is 15 spots within 700 metres of one point in the 13th and 14th arrondissements, an area that gets no coverage at all. It is housing-estate skating, banks and drops and loading-dock ledges, and it is a large fraction of what Marseille actually is.
Then the sea. Down at Prado, the Bowl de Marseille sits on Avenue Pierre Mendès France with the Xoxo shop about 100 metres away and billabong under 300 metres away. A bowl and two shops on the beachfront is a specific kind of Mediterranean arrangement that neither of the other two cities can produce.
The extremes of the map are worth naming because they show the sprawl. staire campus luminy is the southernmost spot, out at the university near the calanques. enorme zone de flat Estaque is the northwestern one, in the old port district up the coast. They are about 18 km apart. Marseille also has the only DIY of the three, labo diy, out on Route de la Valentine. Nine shops, eight parks, 82 street spots: the Marseille page has all of it.
Bordeaux: flat, compact, and built around one slab
Bordeaux is 77 spots, the smallest of the three, and the whole mapped area fits in about 8 km by 7. The city sits on a bend of the Garonne with the old centre on the left bank, and it is flat. No hills means no accidental banks and no run-outs that end in a downhill you did not want. What you get instead is a city you can actually cover on a board.
The centre of gravity is Mériadeck, the elevated concrete district built west of the old town in the 1970s. A dozen spots sit within 500 metres of Mériadeck Hubba, and the two most photographed spots in the entire city are both there: Mériadeck Hubba with 19 photos and Meriadeck 4 Blocks with 15. Around them: Rad bank, Pyramid, Curbs on Terrasse Front du Médoc, Poste de Meriadeck, Firestation and the Tribunal de Grande Instance, which has 9 photos. You could skate that whole list in an afternoon without getting in a tram.
The rest of the centre is the old stone city, which gives you plazas rather than plazas built for skating: Cathédrale St-André (11 photos), Place de la Comedie, Place Gambetta, Porte de Bourgogne and the Miroir d'eau on Quai du Maréchal Lyautey.
Ten shop entries for 77 spots is the highest shop-to-spot ratio of the three, though the number flatters itself: Workshop and Transfert are each listed more than once. Two useful pairings, both real. Riot skateshop is 80 metres from Skatepark des Chartrons on the same quay. And Volcom Bordeaux and Vans are 52 metres apart on Rue Sainte-Catherine.
Cross the river to the right bank for Hangar Darwin on Quai des Queyries and lormont diy further north on Quai de Brazza. Full list on the Bordeaux page.
The route: what a week across all three actually looks like
The obvious plan is a loop, and the obvious plan is wrong, because the three cities are not equally connected. Lyon to Marseille is the easy leg: TGV down the Rhône valley in under two hours, and the two cities are the natural pair. Bordeaux is on the other side of the country. Direct trains from Marseille run cross-country through Toulouse and take something like six hours, which is a full day gone.
So route it through Paris if you are flying into Paris anyway. Paris to Lyon is about two hours, Paris to Bordeaux about two. Lyon and Marseille back to back, then the long ride or a Paris connection to Bordeaux, is a sane week.
If you only have a few days, do Lyon and Marseille. Lyon rewards walking, and the shop cluster on the Presqu'île means you can fix a board and keep going without losing an afternoon. Marseille rewards picking one district and committing to it: the Panier if you want density, the northern hills if you want spots nobody has filmed.
Bordeaux is the one to add when you have the time, and Mériadeck alone justifies the trip. Two days is genuinely enough for it, which is not a criticism.
One caveat on all of this. These counts are what we have mapped, not what exists. Lyon's 160 spots are almost certainly an undercount, and the outer arrondissements of Marseille are thin on the map in a way that says more about who has been adding spots than about what is out there.