Grand Parc Miribel Jonage

This guide to Grand Parc Miribel Jonage outside Lyon follows the Rhône from a river that once flooded and shifted its banks at will, through the two canals engineers cut in 1857 and 1899 to pen it in, to the dam finished in 1937 that turned the land between into a deliberate buffer zone. It then traces how gravel companies quarrying here in the 1970s left behind a flooded pit whose water turned out clean enough for an unplanned second life. Two of the park's small wooded islands are named for a beaver and a turtle.