Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a city on the Pacific coast of southern California, set in a basin between the ocean and the San Gabriel Mountains. Its full Spanish name, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, means the town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels. Hollywood, one of its districts, gave its name to the American film industry.

Governor Felipe de Neve founded the pueblo beside the Los Angeles River in 1781 with settler families from Sonora and Sinaloa. The town passed to Mexico in the 1820s, became part of the United States in the late 1840s and was incorporated as a city in 1850. Railroads from the east arrived in the 1870s and 1880s, and oranges and oil brought rapid growth. The Los Angeles Aqueduct began carrying water from the Owens Valley in the 1910s, the same decade in which the film studios moved to Hollywood. The city held the Summer Olympic Games in the 1930s and again in the 1980s.

The Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro handles container ships from Asia beside the neighboring Port of Long Beach. Paramount Pictures still makes films on its lot on Melrose Avenue, the last of the major studios inside Hollywood itself. Herbalife, a maker of nutrition shakes and supplements, has its headquarters downtown.

Griffith Observatory opened on the slopes of Mount Hollywood in the 1930s, with a public telescope and a planetarium under its copper domes. The Getty Center, designed by Richard Meier and clad in travertine, holds the art collection of the J. Paul Getty Trust on a hilltop in the Santa Monica Mountains. Frank Gehry designed the curved stainless steel walls of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic plays. The Dodgers came west from Brooklyn in the 1950s and have played at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine since the early 1960s.