LOS ANGELES · CALIFORNIA
Palm trees, premieres, and the long gold coast.
Celebrity-homes drives, Hollywood Sign hikes, open-top bus loops and Catalina boats. Santa Monica to Malibu, the studios in Burbank, and the canyons in between.
Only here
Only in the city that makes the movies.
Plenty of places have a skyline and a beach. The star maps, the working backlots and the sign up on the hill belong to this one alone.
The industry town
Celebrity Homes
Open-air vans climb the canyons above Sunset, past the gates of Beverly Hills and the Bird Streets where the names on the mailboxes are the ones on the screen. No other city runs a tour of where the famous actually live, because no other city is the one they all moved to.
- 1 Full-Day Iconic Sights of LA, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Beaches and More
- 2 Hollywood, Beverly Hills & Celebrity Homes Tour by Open Air Bus
- 3 Full-Day LA Tour: Santa Monica, Hollywood and Beverly Hills
Behind the gates
A Working Backlot
Warner Bros and Universal still shoot on the lots you can walk through: standing sets, the prop houses, the soundstages where this season’s films are actually being made. The studio backlot tour is a Los Angeles invention for the simple reason that the backlots are here.
- 1 Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood
- 2 Warner Bros. Studio Tour & Celebrity Homes Tour Package
- 3 LA: Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood & Bus Tour Package
Nine white letters
Up to the Sign
The most photographed sign on earth went up in 1923 as a property advert and never came down. Trails climb the fire roads behind it, e-bikes and open-air vans run the canyon switchbacks, and the view from the ridge takes in the whole basin out to the sea.
- 1 Hollywood Sign 2.5-Hour Tour with Comedians and Their Dogs
- 2 Los Angeles: The Original 2.5-Hour Hollywood Sign Hike
- 3 Los Angeles: Hollywood Sign Walking and Pictures Tour
Start here
If you only book one thing in LA.
More first-timers build their day around this one tour than anything else in the city.
The classics
Los Angeles’s Most Popular Tours
Hollywood, the Sign, the celebrity canyons and the open-top loops. The tours most first visits are built around.
Where to begin
The experiences an LA trip is built around.
The celebrity-homes drives, the Sign, the open-top loops, the harbor cruises, the Catalina crossing and the Malibu vineyards. The handful most trips are planned around, and the best way to do each.
First, the big question
How to see a city this spread out.
LA runs sixty miles from the mountains to the sea with no real centre, so the how matters as much as the where. Three ways to cover it, depending on whether you want the wheel handled, the ground covered, or the wind in your face.
Malibu
Vineyards above the Pacific.
Twenty minutes inland from the surf, the Santa Monica Mountains climb into ranch country where the canyons grow grapes. Open-air safari trucks and shuttle vans run the tasting rooms of Malibu Wine Country, with the chance of an alpaca or a llama wandering the lawn between pours.
Read the guide: the best Malibu wine tours →The coast
Where the city finally hits the sand.
The beaches run unbroken from the Santa Monica Pier down through Venice and on toward the Palos Verdes cliffs, then north along the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. Ferris wheel, boardwalk, bike path and surf, all on one long golden edge of the Pacific.
Santa Monica & the beaches →The day trip across the channel
An island town, an hour offshore.
A fast ferry crosses twenty-two miles of open water to Avalon, a car-free harbour town of golf carts and a 1929 casino ballroom. Glass-bottom boats, the inland safari, snorkelling off the rocks, and the long way back as the mainland lights come up. The most complete day trip LA has.
- 1 Private Guided Golf Cart Tour of Avalon
- 2 Yellow Semi-Submarine Tour of Catalina Island From Avalon
- 3 Catalina Food Tour
From the air
The only way to see all of it at once.
LA is too big to take in from the ground, but six minutes off the pad at Long Beach or Burbank and the whole thing lays out below you: the Hollywood Sign, the downtown towers, the coast curving away to Catalina. Doors-off photo flights, sunset loops and the run out over the harbour.
See all 22 helicopter tours →By area
Pick a corner of LA.
Hollywood for the stars and the studios. Santa Monica and Venice for the pier and the boardwalk. Malibu for the coast road. Long Beach for the harbour. Catalina for the island day. Griffith for the view over all of it.
By activity
Or pick how you want to spend the day.
Open-top bus if you want the whole city. A celebrity-homes van if you came for the stars. A harbour cruise if you want the water. Bikes, helicopters, ghost walks and food crawls for the rest.
Plan it
Three perfect days.
First time in LA? Here is a long weekend that hits the essentials without a wasted hour in traffic.
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