Explore Los Angeles

Angels Flight is a narrow-gauge funicular railway in Downtown Los Angeles that climbs about 90 metres of track between Hill Street and California Plaza on Bunker Hill. First opened in 1901, it was moved half a block and reopened in 1996. Its two orange and black cars, Sinai and Olivet, counterbalance each other on the slope.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, or MOCA, was founded in 1979 and shows art made since 1940. Its main building on Grand Avenue, designed by Arata Isozaki in red sandstone and opened in 1986, holds a collection of some 7,000 works, with abstract expressionism, pop art and art from Los Angeles.

The Broad is a museum of contemporary art on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, opened in 2015 to show the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. The building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro wraps the galleries in a white honeycomb-like shell, and the collection of some 2,000 works includes art by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons.

Los Angeles Union Station opened in 1939 as the city's main railway station and is still its busiest transit hub. The building by John and Donald Parkinson combines Mission Revival, Spanish Colonial and Art Deco styles; visitors walk through the waiting room with its leather armchairs and tiled floors and into two shaded courtyard gardens.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in 1913 in a Beaux-Arts building in Exposition Park. Its collections hold over 35 million specimens and artifacts; visitors see the Dinosaur Hall, the Gem and Mineral Hall, dioramas of African and North American mammals and an exhibition on the history of Los Angeles.

Hollyhock House in Barnsdall Art Park, East Hollywood, was Frank Lloyd Wright's first commission in Los Angeles, built from 1919 to 1921 for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. Its massive walls and roof terraces carry a stylised hollyhock motif. Part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing since 2019, it is shown as a house museum.

Griffith Observatory stands on the southern slope of Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park and opened in 1935. The Art Deco building holds exhibitions on astronomy, the Samuel Oschin Planetarium and a Zeiss refracting telescope open to the public on clear evenings, and its terraces look out over Los Angeles and the Hollywood Sign.

The La Brea Tar Pits are natural asphalt seeps in Hancock Park on Wilshire Boulevard where fossils of Ice Age animals such as mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and dire wolves have been dug up since the early 1900s. The La Brea Tar Pits Museum shows the skeletons, and visitors can watch excavation and fossil preparation in progress.

The Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood is a restaurant of the Hard Rock chain in the Ovation Hollywood complex on Hollywood Boulevard, beside the Dolby Theatre. Its walls and cases show music memorabilia such as stage costumes, guitars and handwritten lyrics, and it has a bar, a stage for live music and a shop.

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 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 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 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.