Where to Stay in Los Angeles, California

What is Los Angeles known for?

Los Angeles is known as the largest city in California and the heart of Southern California, strung along the Pacific coast. Film, television, and music run the show here. The studios made the City of Angels famous, and the downtown galleries carry the art, among them The Broad and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Beaches line the shore. Warm Mediterranean days and the surf culture born on them draw crowds outdoors year round.

What are the main landmarks in Los Angeles?

Los Angeles keeps its landmarks packed into downtown and the old plaza beside it. The Broad and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles anchor the gallery district, with the Grammy Museum and the short funicular of Angels Flight close by. Aon Center towers over them.

In the founding core, La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles, the Japanese American National Museum, and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes tell the city's layered story, near the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial.

What is the history of Los Angeles?

Los Angeles was founded in 1781 as a small farming pueblo on the Southern California plain. The name meant the town of the angels. For its first century it stayed a modest settlement of adobe and orchards, its Spanish roots written into the plaza at its heart.

La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles still stands there, on the ground where the pueblo began. Orchards once covered the flats. The little town grew slowly under the sun.

Adobe walls and dusty lanes lined the young pueblo through those first quiet decades. Everything changed when the film industry arrived. Studios settled across the basin in the early 20th century, and the pueblo grew into the largest city in California and the capital of show business.

The City of Angels became a name known worldwide. Actors, directors, and musicians poured in from across the country. Music and television followed the movies, and the beaches along the Pacific coast bred their own surf culture.

Growth never really stopped. The old plaza and its Spanish name survive at the centre of a metropolis that now sprawls all the way to the sea.

Where is Los Angeles?

Los Angeles lies on the Pacific coast of Southern California, spread across a wide basin between the sea and the hills. The city runs for miles over flat ground and low ridges, reaching from downtown out to the beaches. It sits far from any river of size.

The Pacific coast forms its western edge, while Greater Los Angeles bleeds inland toward Riverside and San Bernardino. The ocean shapes everything here.

What is the climate of Los Angeles?

Los Angeles has a mild Mediterranean climate, the kind that first drew people to Southern California. Summers stay warm and dry, with clear skies over the basin and the beaches. Rain comes mostly in winter.

Even then the days stay soft, rarely cold, and the Pacific coast holds the temperature steady through the year. Sunshine is the one dependable thing.

How do you get to Los Angeles?

Los Angeles is built for arrival by car, though the world flies in first. The main international airport on the coast is one of the busiest anywhere, feeding Southern California from every direction. Freeways do the rest.

A vast web of highways ties Los Angeles to the beaches, the hills, and the sprawl of Greater Los Angeles beyond. Most visitors land and then drive.