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Lyons is a village in Lyons Township, Cook County, along the Des Plaines River just southwest of Chicago.

Lyons contains the Chicago Portage National Historic Site, preserving the low half-mile strip of land that connected the Chicago River system with the Des Plaines River.

In 1673 French explorer Louis Joliet and Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette were guided to this shortcut, discovering Le Portage, which became known as the Chicago Portage and the Gateway to the West for thousands of later settlers and traders.

Joliet was the first to propose cutting a canal through the portage, an idea realized about 200 years later when the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848.

The canal link past Lyons was eventually replaced by the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, completed in 1900.

A statue stands at the Chicago Portage site in Lyons, just north of Interstate 55 along Harlem Avenue, commemorating the historic corridor that runs southwest to La Salle.

Although the area's recorded history reaches back to the 1600s, Lyons itself was not incorporated as a village until 1888.

Lyons's population was 10,817 at the 2020 census, close to its 10,729 residents in 2010.

The village has about 4,100 households averaging about 2.5 people each.

Lyons packs its roughly 10,800 residents into just over two square miles, giving it a population density of nearly 4,900 people per square mile.