Los Angeles

Los Angeles is not a city so much as a hundred of them under one name and one light — a basin of neighborhoods stitched by freeways between the mountains and the Pacific, where a Spanish pueblo of 1781 grew into the capital of the moving image and the largest Mexican, Korean, Armenian, Thai and Filipino cities outside their homelands. It has no centre because it has dozens: Downtown's new towers and old market halls, Hollywood's boulevard under its sign, Santa Monica's pier at the end of Route 66, Venice's canals and boardwalk, Beverly Hills' hush, and Griffith Observatory above them all, where the whole improbable grid lights up at dusk.

The traveller gives each day to a neighborhood and a meal: Downtown for Gehry's Disney Hall, the Broad, Grand Central Market and the pueblo of Olvera Street where it began; the Getty on its hill for the art and the view; Hollywood for the boulevard, then Griffith at sunset for the sign and the sea of lights; the coast for the pier, the Venice boardwalk and, up the highway, Malibu; and the tables — tacos in Boyle Heights, barbecue in Koreatown, a burger from a drive-through — that are the city's true monuments. Summer nights belong to the Hollywood Bowl; the studios open their gates by tour.

The Guide's honesty: distances are the city's only real obstacle — a car helps, the Metro's E line now runs from Downtown to the sea, and the traffic is a character to be planned around, not fought —; June's coastal gloom is a morning affair; the ground moves sometimes and the hills burn some autumns — the fires of January 2025 took the Palisades and Altadena, and the city is rebuilding —; and Los Angeles rewards the visitor who stops looking for a centre and starts collecting neighborhoods, one at a time, in the light that made it.