Places to visit in Los Angeles

Beautifully situated between the Santa Monica Mountains and a spectacular Pacific coastline, Los Angeles in Southern California is a year round destination for tourists and business travellers.

As one of the world’s most important trade centres, Los Angeles offers trade fairs, culture, media, fashion, science, technology and education in equal measure, but as the entertainment capital of the world, Los Angeles outshines all others.

Hollywood and Disneyland are perhaps the city’s most enduring and evocative locations for tourists around the world. Who hasn’t dreamed of putting their hands onto the hand imprints of one of their favourite stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame or joining a bus tour that travels around the districts where the stars of Tinsel Town have their amazing homes?

Among the Los Angeles tourist attractions that are most iconic is the Griffith Observatory, a location used as backdrop in many films and television series. Offering not just spectacular views of the skies at night, the observatory also overlooks the city’s urban sprawl, the USA’s second largest city. At night, when the city is lit up one can see the grid of the roads and the hustle and bustle of life below in all its sparkling glory.

Another landmark building is the Los Angeles Coliseum, where the 1932 and the 1984 Olympic Games were hosted, but for sheer riot of colour and examples of the relaxed Californian lifestyle one should visit green urban spaces like MacArthur and Echo Park and the Pacific coast at Venice Beach Promenade.

Travelling by hire car opens up the amazing opportunity to see the Hollywood Sign, perched high in the Hollywood Hills, up close and personal. There are so many landmark buildings and monuments in LA that visiting them by public transport would probably take months!

From the Dodgers Stadium to the Staples Centre, from the Kodak Theatre to the Getty Centre and the round Capitol Records Building, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles tourist attractions never fail to astound and delight.

The Kodak Theatre, one of the most famous sites in the world, is the usual haunt of the Academy Awards ceremony, otherwise known as The Oscars. The annual awards ceremony honours the achievements of the world’s most famous and glamorous protagonists, namely the actors and actresses, directors and cinematographers that make the American film industry the most successful in the world. An Art Deco Los Angeles tourist attraction in its own right, the Kodak Theatre also hosts many premiers of films.

Some of the most landmark buildings in the city belong to media giants like the Art Deco headquarter of Lost Angeles Times, built like a fortress rising out of a forest or the skyscraper of Fox Plaza in Century City, the headquarters of 20th Century Fox located in one of Los Angeles’ most important financial districts.

Among the 841 museums and galleries that Los Angeles County has to offer, the Getty Centre and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art stand out, as does the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Los Angeles tourist attractions also include the stadiums devoted America’s national sport, baseball, and the major league baseball heroes of the Los Angeles Dodgers have their home at the Dodgers Stadium, a triangular pitch that has seen many famous faces of the both the sports and the entertainment world, since many singers have opened the season by singing the National Anthem here.