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Los Angeles
The sprawling capital of American entertainment, beneath the San Gabriels
Los Angeles spreads across a coastal basin in defiance of every old idea about what a city should be: low-rise, decentralized, stitched together by freeways rather than a single dense core. Some thirteen million people inhabit a metropolis that runs from the Pacific surf to the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, a place built less around a downtown than around the automobile and the studio lot. It is the global headquarters of the moving image, the second-largest city in the United States, and a Pacific gateway whose ports handle a vast share of the nation's trade.
The city sits in the Los Angeles Basin, a flat alluvial plain ringed by mountains that trap both sunshine and smog. The Santa Monica Mountains cut through the urban fabric, separating the coastal flats from the San Fernando Valley, and the higher San Gabriels rise abruptly to the north and east. Elevations swing from sea level at the beaches to well over a thousand meters in the hills within the city limits. The Los Angeles River, once a wild seasonal torrent, runs mostly through a concrete channel now. The region straddles active faults, and the dry Mediterranean climate turns the surrounding chaparral into tinder each fire season.
Spanish settlers founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781, a small farming town that remained obscure under Spanish, then Mexican, then American rule until the railroads and the discovery of oil transformed it. The film industry arrived in the 1910s, drawn by reliable sunshine and varied scenery, and Hollywood became a worldwide synonym for cinema. Aerospace and shipping followed. Today Los Angeles is a vast immigrant gateway, particularly from Latin America and Asia, and a sprawling cultural laboratory whose influence on film, music, and style reaches every corner of the planet.