NOT content with admiring Europe from afar, the Arab emirate of Dubai is to build a replica of Lyons under a £350m deal signed with the French city last week.

The French like to talk of their “civilising mission” abroad, but duplicating Lyons’s main cultural, gastronomic and sporting institutions in the middle of the desert was not their idea: it is the obsession of Saeed al-Gandhi, a Dubai businessman.

“He fell in love with Lyons while strolling along the river-bank,” said José Noya, an official at Lyons town hall. “He wants to recreate Lyons’s soul.”

Inspiration struck al-Gandhi while he was drawing up plans to build a French-language university in Dubai in partnership with the University of Lyons. Not wanting to be outdone by Abu Dhabi, another Arab emirate, which has announced it will build its own version of the Louvre, al-Gandhi hit upon the idea of “Lyons-Dubai City”, as the new metropolis will be known, or “Lyons’s oriental little sister”, as they call it in the French town hall.

Lyons and Dubai had already signed a “pact of cooperation and friendship” but al-Gandhi’s idea adds a new twist to twinning: the new Lyons will cover an area of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and will contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums.

Al-Gandhi could have picked a worse place. Famed as the home of gastronomy and the birthplace of cinema, Lyons sits between two of France’s best-known wine-growing regions. Even so, Dubai is unlikely to want to copy the decrepit tower blocks that ring the real city, symbols of the urban violence that periodically plagues France. Nor is the country’s recent smoking ban in public places expected to be exported.

The desert city will include a Paul Bocuse Institute, like the one in Lyons named after the hallowed chef, in which students will study hotel management and gastronomy.

“We are setting up the new school in Dubai because the tourism industry is really developed there,” said Hervé Fleury of the institute. “The demand for able managers is enormous.”

There will also be a football training centre run by the Olympique Lyonnais team, prompting dreams in Dubai of the little-known national XI qualifying one day for the World Cup.

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