Los Angeles is like a big puzzle with pieces that don’t quite fit together when our team experience a 60 dyas trip in Los Angles we conclude all the best Things to do in Los Angeles in this article. It’s got everything from endless neighbourhoods to beaches and hills. There’s fancy art stuff and super fun theme parks.Trying to describe it all is like trying to catch a slippery fish.You could spend a long time exploring fancy museums without ever going to Hollywood or you could just focus on visiting movie studios and famous spots from TV and movies.It’s like having two totally different vacations in one city.You might want to find the yummiest taco truck or spot the next funny person in Silver Lake or Echo Park.
Los Angeles isn’t known for easy walking but you can still get moving with cool hikes in Hollywood Hills or chill bike rides by the beach.
Let’s Explore Things to do in Los Angeles
- Griffith Park
- The Getty Center
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Getty Villa
- La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum
- Venice Canals
- Pacific Park
- Hollywood Bowl
Griffith Park
In 1896 a wealthy man named Griffith gave Los Angeles a big piece of land called Rancho Los Feliz. It was like a Christmas gift. Now it’s even bigger and is one of the largest parks in the whole country. Griffith Park is like a wild backyard with parts of the Santa Monica Mountains and lots of paths for walking and horseback riding.
There’s a zoo and two golf courses (Harding and Wilson) here along with train and pony rides for kids tennis courts, food stands and places to have picnics. The Hollywood Sign is in the park and you can get there by hiking which is a bit hard.
There’s a super cool spot up there with a great view of Hollywood and Burbank but it’s not marked.
You can join a guided tour on to hike around Griffith Park and see the Hollywood Sign.They’ll stop sometimes so you can see the city and learn cool stuff about the park and Hollywood’s history.
The Getty Center
The big Getty Museum is in Brentwood looking over Los Angeles from a hill. Jean Paul Getty the man who started the museum left a huge chunk of his fortune to it when he passed away in 1976. With that money they created the amazing Getty Center. Building the Getty Center was a massive undertaking that required years of careful planning and hard work. But in 1997 all that effort paid off when it welcomed its first visitors.
Now at the Getty Center there’s a handy train that shuttles you from the parking lot right to the main part of the centre making it easy for everyone to enjoy. It’s a really awesome place with neat buildings designed by Richard Meier who won a big architecture prize.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
LACMA is a huge art museum on Wilshire Boulevard. It has seven buildings on a big piece of land. It’s the biggest art museum in the western U.S. and one of the largest in the whole country.
They have got a ton of stuff from all over the world from ancient times to now.Think geek Roman and Etruscan art American and Latin American art, modern and contemporary art, Islamic and Asian art, cool decorative stuff, photos and movies.And there are some really famous pieces you gotta see like Diego Rivera’s portrait of Frida Kahlo, David Hockney’s painting of Mulholland Drive Titian’s portrait Gauguin’s painting of a guy with pigs and Chris Burden’s Urban Light at the entrance on Wilshire Boulevard.
Getty Villa
Before the big Getty Center we know today there was a place called the Getty Villa. A very wealthy man named J. Paul Getty had lots of beautiful art but not enough space to display it. So he thought I needed a bigger place.
And that’s how they made the Getty Villa in the 1970s.The Getty Villa sits on the land below with a view of the Pacific Ocean.
It was built in 1974 to look like a fancy Roman house from long ago called the Villa of the Papyri. After getting fixed up it reopened in 2006. Now it holds ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan stuff from a long long time ago up to about 400 CE.
La Brea Tar Pits and Page Museum
A long time ago before LA was a city animals got stuck in sticky tar at Hancock Park.Thick oil from Salt Lake Oil Field would come up and turn into tar. Animals like mammoths and sabre-toothed cats would step on it and get stuck perfectly preserved.
People have found about 400 animals in the pits and they’re still digging at Pit 91. The nearby George C. Page Museum tells us all about these discoveries. It opened in 1977 but started way back in 1913.
At the museum you can see cool things from the pits and learn how it happened. Outside there are models of the trapped animals.
Venice Canals
At the start of the 1900s Abbot Kinney, a developer, came up with a small copy of Venice’s water roads called the Venice of America.
Fed by the Pacific Ocean through gates at Marina Del Rey Breakwater these charming water paths were made in 1905. But by the late 1920s they were old fashioned and over many years were left to become broken. In the 1990s the waterways got fixed up and turned into a great place to live. It’s a cosy neighbourhood just a short walk from Venice Beach.You can take calm walks by the water, cross cute little bridges and see ducklings in the summer.Just like always you probably recognize these canals from movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
Pacific Park
The only amusement park on a pier on the West Coast of the United States is Pacific Park. You can go in for free and it has 12 rides. Pacific Park and Santa Monica Pier have been in lots of movies and TV shows. They even made them look real in the video game GTA V. Pacific Park started in the 1910s and got going again in the 1990s. It says it’s the only amusement park in LA where you don’t have to pay to get in.
You have to pay for each ride. They’ve got cool ones like the steel West Coaster and the Pacific Wheel. The Pacific Wheel was in a Steven Spielberg movie and it’s the only Ferris wheel in the world powered by the sun.
The pier is actually two parts stuck together.The Santa Monica Municipal Pier is long and thin built in 1909 to carry away sewage.Then there’s the Pleasure Pier started in 1916 by a guy named Charles I.D. Looff who made Coney Island’s first merry-go -round.
Hollywood Bowl
The Hollywood Bowl is a big amphitheatre in the Hollywood Hills.You can see the Hollywood Sign from there. Lots of famous people like Fred Astaire Louis Armstrong and the Beatles have done shows here. There are so many big names that it’s hard to think of ones who haven’t performed here. The Hollywood Bowl is where the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra play in the summer. They’ve been doing it since 1990.
The stage they have now is the fifth one they made at the Hollywood Bowl. Two stages before were made by a famous architect named Frank Lloyd Wright but they only stayed for one season each in the 1920s.
Then they built another stage in 1929 but people didn’t like how it sounded. So they put in a new one in 2004.
There’s a free museum in the old Tea Room.It’s the first building you see if you come in through Highland Avenue. They’ve got pictures and programs from the Hollywood Bowl since it started in 1922.
