Musée des Confluences

This guide to Musee des Confluences in Lyon starts with what stood here before the striking glass building: the working docks of Port Rambaud, where barges unloaded coal, salt, sugar and wine from 1926 onward, alongside the warehouses of La Sucriere and the Pavillon des Salins. It traces the peninsula's abandonment after the port closed in 1993, and the years-long project that replaced it with a deconstructed cloud of glass and steel by an Austrian architecture firm. La Sucriere itself still stands a few steps along the quay, its floors now holding art instead of sugar sacks.