Vénissieux Population and Area (Rhône)
Largest city in France 2026: up-to-date figures for Vénissieux (Rhône)
Vénissieux: Population and Area
With 65,689 inhabitants (INSEE total population in force on January 1, 2026), Vénissieux is the 83rd most populous town in France in 2026 and the 3rd most populous in the Rhône department, out of 266 communes. It covers 15 km² (11,784th largest area in France, 71st largest in the department), with a population density of 4,285 inhabitants per km², or 39 times the national average (110 inhabitants/km²), which ranks it 181st in France for density.
Vénissieux is located in the Rhône department (69), in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region (formerly Rhône-Alpes), where it ranks 7th by population out of 4,025 communes. The most populous town in the Rhône department is Lyon (525,314 inhabitants); the department is home to 1,940,015 people over 3,249 km².
See the full ranking of communes in the Rhône department and the regional ranking: largest city in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes.
Towns of similar size in the Rhône department: Lyon (pop. 525,314), Villeurbanne (pop. 164,747), Vaulx-en-Velin (pop. 53,281), Saint-Priest (pop. 49,498), Caluire-et-Cuire (pop. 44,139).
Sources: INSEE, official population figures in force on January 1, 2026 (total population); areas: IGN / Observatoire des territoires; INSEE code 69259. Rankings are calculated across the 34,858 communes of metropolitan and overseas France in our database.
Vénissieux, a large town in the Lyon suburbs
The third most populous town in the Rhône, after Lyon and Villeurbanne, Vénissieux lies southeast of Lyon, within the Métropole de Lyon. Like its neighbor Villeurbanne, it is neither a prefecture nor a subprefecture: its size comes entirely from its role in the Lyon urban area.
An industrial town and its housing projects
A farming village until the early 20th century, Vénissieux industrialized with the arrival of the Berliet truck factories, which later became Renault Trucks, and of the chemical industry. To house the workers, large housing projects were built in the 1960s and 1970s on the Minguettes plateau, more than doubling the town's population in about fifteen years. It was at the initiative of young people from Les Minguettes that the March for Equality and Against Racism was organized in 1983. Since then, urban renewal has torn down some of the towers and diversified the housing, while the tramway links the town to central Lyon.