[en] An experimental and theoretical investigation of lifetimes of metastable levels in La II has been performed. The experimentally obtained results using the laser probing of a stored ion beam were tau=5.2+/-0.2 s for the a(1)G(4) and tau=2.1+/-0.3 s for the b(1)D(2) levels. Within the error bars, the results are in good agreement with the relativistic Hartree-Fock calculations including core polarization.