Explore Los Angeles

Madame Tussauds Hollywood is a wax museum on Hollywood Boulevard, next to the TCL Chinese Theatre. It opened in 2009 and shows more than a hundred wax figures of film and television actors, musicians and athletes, arranged in themed rooms where visitors can stand beside them for photos.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, known as LACMA, is the largest art museum in the western United States, on Wilshire Boulevard next to the La Brea Tar Pits. Founded in 1961 and opened at this site in 1965, it holds art from antiquity to the present, from Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Islamic world.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame runs along 15 blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and three blocks of Vine Street. Since 1960 more than 2,700 five-pointed terrazzo and brass stars have been set into the pavement, each with the name of a person or group honoured for work in film, television, music, radio or theatre.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is the film museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Wilshire Boulevard. It opened in 2021 in the restored 1939 May Company department store and a spherical theater designed by Renzo Piano, with exhibitions on filmmaking, film history and the Oscars.

The Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard shows the history and culture of the car across three floors. Founded in 1994 by the publisher Robert E. Petersen, it was given a new façade of red and silver steel ribbons in 2015. Its rotating exhibitions cover racing cars, film cars and design, and a guided Vault tour shows more of the collection.

The Hollywood Bowl is an open-air amphitheatre in a natural hollow of the Hollywood Hills, opened in 1922. Its concentric white shell, rebuilt in 2004, frames a stage for about 17,500 spectators. It is the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and also hosts pop concerts and film screenings with live orchestra.

The Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens lies in the north-east corner of Griffith Park and opened in 1966. It keeps around 1,400 animals of some 270 species in habitats grouped by region, among them the Elephants of Asia area and a gorilla reserve, and it took part in the breeding programme that saved the California condor.

The Hollywood Sign spells HOLLYWOOD in white letters about 14 metres tall on Mount Lee in the Santa Monica Mountains. Put up in 1923 to advertise a housing development called Hollywoodland, it lost its last four letters in 1949 and was rebuilt in steel in 1978. The sign is fenced off; it is seen from Griffith Park and the streets of Hollywood.

The Colorado Street Bridge carries Colorado Boulevard about 45 metres above the Arroyo Seco on the western edge of Pasadena. Opened in 1913, the concrete bridge follows a curve across the ravine on a series of tall arches with Beaux-Arts lamp posts and railings, and it was restored after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

The Norton Simon Museum on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena shows the collection assembled by the industrialist Norton Simon, who took over the former Pasadena Art Museum in 1974. It holds European art from the Renaissance to the 20th century, with works by Raphael, Rembrandt, Degas and Van Gogh, and sculpture from South and Southeast Asia.

The Gamble House in Pasadena was built in 1908 by the architects Charles and Henry Greene as a winter home for David and Mary Gamble of Procter & Gamble. It is a key work of the American Arts and Crafts movement, with deep eaves, sleeping porches and hand-crafted teak and mahogany interiors, and is shown on guided tours.

Universal Studios Hollywood is a film studio and theme park in Universal City, in the hills above Hollywood. Its Studio Tour has driven visitors through the working backlot and its film sets since 1964, and the park adds rides and areas based on films, among them The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Super Nintendo World.

The Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood takes visitors onto the working Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, near Los Angeles, a film and television studio in use since the late 1920s. Guided carts pass backlot streets and soundstages, and the tour ends at Stage 48 with sets, costumes and props, including the Central Perk set from Friends.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, next to Pasadena, was founded in 1919 by the railway magnate Henry E. Huntington. Its library holds rare books and manuscripts such as a Gutenberg Bible; the art collections include Gainsborough's The Blue Boy, and some 49 hectares of themed gardens surround the buildings.