North America
Los Angeles
A sprawling city of neighbourhoods, sunshine, and an entertainment industry that has shaped global culture for a century
Entertainment Capital
Hollywood, the studios, and a film culture that still sets the terms for the rest of the world.
Beach Culture
Santa Monica, Venice, and Malibu — the Pacific coast that defined a way of life.
Food & Neighbourhoods
From Koreatown to Boyle Heights — some of the most diverse and inventive eating in America.
Los Angeles only makes sense once you stop expecting it to behave like a conventional city. It has no single centre, no dominant pedestrian logic, and no obvious place to begin. What it has instead is a basin full of distinct neighbourhoods connected by freeways, each operating with its own character and its own reasons to visit. Silver Lake has the independent record shops and coffee roasters. Culver City has the galleries. Los Feliz has the old movie palaces and the Griffith Observatory above it on the hill. Koreatown runs around the clock. Boyle Heights has been making tacos the same way for generations. The city rewards the visitor who picks a few areas and commits to them over the one who tries to cover everything and spends half the trip in traffic.
The entertainment industry is both a backdrop and an attraction. The studios in Burbank and Culver City offer tours that go behind the working sets of active productions. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which opened in 2021, is the first serious museum dedicated to the history and craft of cinema in the city that made cinema what it is — its permanent collection and architecture are both worth the visit. The Hollywood Bowl, set into a hillside in the Santa Monica Mountains, is one of the great outdoor concert venues in the world; catching a performance there on a warm evening, with the hills behind the stage and the stars above, is one of those experiences that the city does better than anywhere else.
The coastline runs the full western edge of the city and changes character as it goes. Santa Monica has a pier, a farmers' market, and a wide beach that draws the full cross-section of the city on weekends. Venice Beach is stranger and more interesting — the boardwalk, the canals laid out by Abbot Kinney in 1905, the outdoor gym at Muscle Beach, and the street artists who have been performing here for decades. Malibu, north of the city proper, extends along 43 kilometres of Pacific Coast Highway with the Santa Monica Mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, and contains some of the most expensive and most spectacular coastline in California.