Explore Santa Monica

The Third Street Promenade is a pedestrian street of three blocks in Downtown Santa Monica, between Wilshire Boulevard and Broadway, two blocks from the beach. Closed to cars in 1965 and redesigned in 1989, it is lined with shops, cinemas and restaurants, has fountains with topiary dinosaurs and is a regular spot for street performers.

The Santa Monica Pier reaches about 490 metres into the Pacific at the foot of Colorado Avenue. Built in 1909, it carries the Looff Hippodrome of 1916 with its carousel, the small Pacific Park amusement park with a solar-powered Ferris wheel, an aquarium run by Heal the Bay, restaurants and anglers' rails, and marks the western end of Route 66.

Venice Beach is the beach and oceanfront boardwalk of Venice, a Los Angeles neighbourhood founded in 1905 by Abbot Kinney with canals modelled on Venice in Italy. The paved Ocean Front Walk is lined with shops, food stands and street performers, and along the sand are the Muscle Beach outdoor gym, a skate park and basketball courts.

The Getty Center is the hilltop campus of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood, designed by Richard Meier and opened in 1997. A tram brings visitors up from the car park to pavilions clad in travertine that show European paintings, drawings, sculpture, manuscripts and photographs, and to the Central Garden designed by Robert Irwin.

The Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades is the J. Paul Getty Museum's site for the art of ancient Greece, Rome and Etruria. Opened in 1974 and modelled on the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, it holds about 44,000 antiquities in galleries around peristyle gardens with a long reflecting pool, above the Pacific Coast Highway.

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 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 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 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.