Los Angeles

Top things to do in Los Angeles

1. 01

   Griffith Observatory - the whole basin from the slope of Mount Hollywood

   scenic culture arts 👍 Popular

   The art deco domes on the south face of Griffith Park give the definitive view: the grid running away to the ocean on one side, the Hollywood Sign on the ridge behind. Inside there is a Foucault pendulum swinging in the rotunda, a Tesla coil, a planetarium under the central dome and public telescopes pointed at whatever is up on clear evenings. Admission to the building has been free since it opened, on the terms of the founder's bequest, and the surrounding hillside is where the city goes to watch the sun set.

2. 02

   The Getty Center - travertine pavilions and gardens above the Sepulveda Pass

   culture arts scenic ⭐ Highly recommended

   Richard Meier's white campus sits on a ridge reached by a hillside tram, and the architecture, the gardens and the view over the basin would justify the trip with nothing hanging on the walls. As it is, the galleries hold European painting including Van Gogh's Irises, illuminated manuscripts, French decorative arts and a serious photography collection, while Robert Irwin's Central Garden spirals down the ravine between the buildings.

3. 03

   Koreatown, Thai Town and the San Gabriel Valley - eating across the immigrant map

   food ⭐ Highly recommended

   This is the real case for Los Angeles at the table. Koreatown does barbecue and late-night stews on a scale nowhere else in the country matches, Hollywood holds the only official Thai Town in America, and the strip malls of the San Gabriel Valley east of downtown carry the deepest range of regional Chinese cooking outside Asia, from Sichuan to Shanghainese dumplings. Add the taquerias, birria trucks and Oaxacan kitchens of the Eastside and you can eat for a fortnight without repeating a cuisine.

4. 04

   Universal Studios Hollywood - the backlot tram tour

   culture arts 👍 Popular

   A working studio with a theme park bolted to it, up on the hill above the Cahuenga Pass. The rides are good, but the part that exists nowhere else is the tram tour through the standing sets and backlot streets, with the set-piece stunts staged along the way and a running commentary on what was shot where. Come on a weekday and start at the far end of the lower lot to run against the crowd.

5. 05

   Santa Monica Pier and the beach path - the Ferris wheel at the end of Route 66

   scenic 👍 Popular

   The 1909 pier carries a small amusement park with a solar-powered Ferris wheel, a 1920s carousel in its wooden hippodrome and an aquarium tucked underneath the deck. The better reason to come is the paved beach path that runs past it for about 35 km, from the Palisades bluffs down through Venice and the South Bay, which is the one stretch of Los Angeles built entirely for people not in cars.

6. 06

   Venice Beach - the Ocean Front Walk, the canals and Abbot Kinney

   culture arts scenic

   The boardwalk is the city's carnival: street performers, the open-air weight pen at Muscle Beach, one of the first concrete skate parks and a solid mile of stalls. It is also chaotic and visibly troubled in places, so treat it as a spectacle rather than a stroll. A few blocks inland the surviving canals from Abbot Kinney's 1905 resort scheme are silent and pretty, and Abbot Kinney Boulevard itself is a run of shops and small restaurants.

7. 07

   Los Angeles County Museum of Art - Urban Light and the encyclopedic collection

   culture arts

   The largest art museum in the western United States, spread along Wilshire Boulevard behind Chris Burden's Urban Light, a forest of restored cast-iron streetlamps that has become the city's most photographed sculpture. Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass, a giant granite boulder suspended over a walkway, sits at the back. A long campus rebuild has been under way for years, so check which galleries are open before you plan a day around it.

8. 08

   La Brea Tar Pits - Ice Age fossils bubbling up beside the museums

   history nature wildlife

   Natural asphalt still seeps to the surface in Hancock Park, as it has for tens of thousands of years, and the animals it trapped were dug out by the hundred thousand: dire wolves, sabre-toothed cats, mammoths, giant sloths. The museum on site shows the excavated bone walls and a working lab, there is an active dig you can watch in the park, and the whole place smells faintly of tar on a hot day.

9. 09

   The Broad - contemporary art behind the honeycomb veil on Grand Avenue

   culture arts

   A collection of postwar and contemporary work in a perforated concrete shell downtown, strong on Basquiat, Warhol, Koons, Kruger and Sherman, with a Kusama infinity room that runs on timed slots. General admission has been free since the building opened, which makes it the easiest serious art hour in the city, and the Museum of Contemporary Art sits two blocks along the same street.

10. 10

    Walt Disney Concert Hall - Gehry's steel sails on Bunker Hill

    culture arts

    Frank Gehry's billowing stainless-steel exterior is the building people photograph, but the room inside is the point: a vineyard-style auditorium with the audience wrapped around the orchestra, widely rated among the best-sounding halls anywhere. The public rooftop garden is open during the day and largely unvisited, and self-guided audio tours run when the hall is not in use.

11. 11

    Grand Central Market - the downtown food hall under the neon

    food

    Open on Broadway since 1917 and still a market rather than a food court, with counters running from egg sandwiches and pupusas to Thai and old-school Mexican, several of them decades old. It sits at the foot of Bunker Hill, with the tiny Angels Flight funicular climbing the slope directly across the street and the surviving movie palaces of Broadway a short walk south.

12. 12

    Hollywood Boulevard - the Walk of Fame, the Chinese Theatre and the Egyptian

    culture arts history

    Manage your expectations: the brass stars are set into a scruffy, crowded pavement and the street itself is a hustle. What earns the visit is the 1927 Chinese Theatre with its forecourt of hand and footprints, the restored 1922 Egyptian Theatre a block east, and the Dolby Theatre where the Academy Awards are handed out. Go in daylight, look up at the buildings rather than down at the pavement, and do not linger after dark.

13. 13

    Griffith Park and Runyon Canyon - a real hike inside the city

    scenic nature wildlife

    Griffith Park is one of the largest urban parks in North America, and its trails climb to the ridge behind the Hollywood Sign, where you stand above the back of the letters. Runyon Canyon above West Hollywood is the short, steep, sociable option, and the Santa Monica Mountains run west from there all the way to the sea, carrying the long-distance Backbone Trail. Start early: there is little shade on any of it.

14. 14

    Malibu and the Pacific Coast Highway - Surfrider, Zuma and the canyon roads

    surfing scenic

    The long right-hand point break at Surfrider is where modern surf culture was filmed into existence, and it still works best on a summer south swell. Zuma and Point Dume give open sand and headland walks, El Matador is the photogenic cove of sea stacks, and the canyon roads climb from the highway into the Santa Monica Mountains. Fire has repeatedly closed stretches of this coast and its canyons, so check road and beach access before committing to a route.

15. 15

    The Huntington - library, art collection and botanical gardens in San Marino

    culture arts nature wildlife

    A railway magnate's estate east of Pasadena that is three institutions at once: a research library holding a Gutenberg Bible and an early Canterbury Tales manuscript, a gallery with Gainsborough's Blue Boy, and sixteen garden landscapes across the grounds, including a Chinese garden built around a lake and one of the great desert-plant collections. Half a day minimum, and entry usually needs booking ahead.

16. 16

    Watts Towers - Simon Rodia's steel spires in South Los Angeles

    culture arts history

    An Italian immigrant tile-setter spent thirty-three years building seventeen interlinked towers of steel rod, mortar, broken pottery, bottle glass and seashells in his narrow back yard, working alone and without scaffolding, then signed the property over and walked away. The city tried to demolish them as unsafe until a load test failed to pull them down. Tours run on limited days, so check the schedule rather than turning up.

17. 17

    Academy Museum of Motion Pictures - the film business tells its own story

    culture arts history

    The industry's museum, in a restored 1939 department store on Wilshire with a spherical concrete theatre grafted on behind it. The collection runs from the ruby slippers and the mechanical shark from Jaws to costume, sound and editing craft, an honest account of who the Academy left out for decades, and a rooftop terrace looking straight up at the Hollywood Hills.

18. 18

    El Pueblo and Olvera Street - the block the city started on

    history food

    The founding site of the 1781 pueblo, kept as a plaza with the Avila Adobe, the oldest standing house in the city, opening off it. Olvera Street is the adjoining market lane of Mexican stalls, taquito counters and craft shops, restored in the 1920s and busy ever since. Union Station stands across the road, its 1939 waiting hall a masterpiece of Spanish Mission mixed with art deco.

19. 19

    Dodger Stadium - a night game in Chavez Ravine

    history scenic

    One of the oldest ballparks still in use, cut into a hillside north of downtown with palm trees and the San Gabriel Mountains behind the outfield, and it is a genuinely great place to watch a game on a warm evening. The ground carries a harder story too: the Mexican-American communities of Chavez Ravine were cleared from this hillside in the 1950s under a housing scheme that was scrapped before the stadium took the land.

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