The Festival of Lights, Fête des Lumières, takes place in the city of Lyon. Lyon is the capital city of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region which borders onto Switzerland and Italy. The French festival takes place over four days, around the 8th of December.

The origins of the festival date back to 1852 when the city was going through hard times of flooding and unrest. On the 8th of December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a statue of the Virgin Mary was going to be unveiled at the top of a big hill in Lyon. Due to the bad weather, the statue couldn’t be delivered. Instead, as the night came and the weather calmed, the people of Lyon put candles in their window. This lit up whole areas of the city, and became a yearly tradition.