Los Angeles is a city built on storytelling — the place where, by the early 1920s, most of the world's films were being made, and where the entertainment industry still sets the tone a century later. Founded in 1781 as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, it has grown into the second-largest city in the United States: a sun-washed sprawl running from Pacific beaches across the Santa Monica Mountains, home to communities from nearly every corner of the world. Fittingly for a city of narrators, the best way to explore it is with stories in your ears — self-guided audio tours let you roam LA's scattered icons at your own pace, each landmark's history told as you stand in front of it.
"Everything loose will land in Los Angeles," Frank Lloyd Wright is said to have quipped — and that magnetic pull of dreamers, immigrants and reinventors is exactly what gives the city its character.
Hollywood and the hills
Start where the myth was manufactured. More than 2,600 brass stars stud the Hollywood Walk of Fame along Hollywood Boulevard, while over the hill Universal Studios Hollywood — the world's oldest movie theme park — still doubles as a working backlot. Above it all in Griffith Park sits the Griffith Observatory, free to enter since it opened in 1935 and today the most-visited public observatory in the world. Its terraces give the classic vantage on the Hollywood Sign, and an audio guide can walk you from the Art Deco rotunda to the Zeiss telescope that more people have looked through than any other on Earth.
From the pier to the market
On the coast, Santa Monica Pier marks the official end of Route 66, its Ferris wheel turning over the Pacific since long before selfies existed. Downtown, Grand Central Market has fed the city since 1917, its neon-lit stalls tracing a century of immigration one taco and breakfast sandwich at a time. And on a hilltop to the west, The Getty pairs a world-class art collection with gardens, its own tram and panoramic views back over the basin. Listening to the story behind each stop turns the drive between neighborhoods into one connected journey rather than a checklist.
Why Los Angeles now
LA rewards travelers who embrace its scale: pick a district — beach town, studio lot, downtown food hall or mountaintop museum — and give it a full day. With the Summer Olympics returning in 2028 for a record-tying third time, the city is polishing its icons all over again. Queue up an audio guide, choose your neighborhood, and let the city that tells stories for a living tell you its own.