Los Angeles

💡 About Los Angeles

Los Angeles, the City of Angels, sprawls across 1,302 square kilometres of coastal plain and inland valleys in Southern California in a manner so vast, so decentralised and so automobile-dependent that it has been described less as a city and more as a collection of 88 separate cities orbiting a shared freeway system — yet this diffuse, improbable metropolis of four million people (or 13 million in the greater metropolitan area) has exerted more influence on global popular culture than any other place on Earth. Hollywood, the neighbourhood that became synonymous with the American film industry after the first studios relocated there from New York in the 1910s to take advantage of California's reliable sunlight and varied landscapes, remains the production centre of the global entertainment industry — the studios of Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount and Disney that ring the city produce the films, television series and streaming content that shape the imagination of billions of people worldwide. The Los Angeles Basin sits in one of the most seismically active regions on Earth, crisscrossed by more than 400 fault lines including the San Andreas Fault, which runs along the eastern boundary of the metropolitan area and is capable of producing a magnitude 8.0 earthquake; the city government's "ShakeAlertLA" warning system and the building codes that require new construction to withstand major earthquakes are testaments to the constant geological drama that underlies the sunny surface.

The Getty Center, perched in the Santa Monica Mountains above the 405 Freeway, is one of the great art museums of the American West — its travertine pavilions designed by Richard Meier house a collection that spans 2,000 years of European painting, drawing, sculpture and decorative arts, and its hilltop garden, designed by Robert Irwin, frames views across the Pacific Ocean on clear days. Los Angeles is perhaps the most ethnically diverse large city in the United States: its Korean-town is the largest outside Korea, its San Gabriel Valley has the highest concentration of Chinese and Chinese-American residents outside of China, its Thai Town and Little Ethiopia and Koreatown and Little Tokyo and Historic Filipinotown all exist as living, functioning cultural enclaves rather than theme parks. The city's natural environment is extraordinary: within 90 minutes of downtown Los Angeles you can ski in the San Bernardino Mountains, swim in the Pacific at Santa Monica, hike in Joshua Tree National Park, or kayak through the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary — a diversity of landscape that no other American city approaches.

Griffith Observatory, perched on the south face of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park and visible from much of the Los Angeles Basin, has been introducing Angelenos to the cosmos since 1935 and has appeared in dozens of films, most memorably in James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause; on clear nights its public telescopes offer views of the moon, planets and stars to anyone who shows up. The Venice Beach Boardwalk — a 3-kilometre promenade where bodybuilders pump iron at Muscle Beach, street performers juggle fire, roller skaters dance to boom boxes and artists display their work on the chain-link fences of the beachfront — embodies a Los Angeles freedom and eccentricity that the city's entertainment-industry image sometimes obscures.

⭐ Known For