What's the must-see thing in Los Angeles?

The Getty Center, not the Hollywood Sign. Everyone photographs the 14-metre white letters on Mount Lee, and that's fine. You can see them from dozens of spots across the basin without a dedicated trip. The Getty requires commitment, and it repays it. You park at the Sepulveda Pass base for $20 (reservation required), board a driverless tram, and ride 5 minutes up the hillside while the 405 freeway shrinks to a grey ribbon below. At the top, Richard Meier's 1997 campus covers 110 acres of travertine hauled from Bagni di Tivoli, Italy. The stone is rough under your fingertips, each block cut to expose its fossil beds. On a clear June afternoon at 26°C, Robert Irwin's Central Garden smells like sage and lavender from 500 plant varieties. Van Gogh's Irises hangs in the West Pavilion. Admission is $0. That combination, free entry to a billion-dollar campus with a serious permanent collection, does not exist anywhere else in the country.

Griffith Observatory sits at 346 metres on the south face of Mount Hollywood, inside the 1,700-hectare Griffith Park. The 1935 Art Deco building is free to enter. From the west terrace you get the Hollywood Sign at eye level, 2.6 km northeast. From the east terrace, downtown's towers float above the haze on most afternoons. The planetarium runs 30-minute shows for $7 per adult. Mind you, the place fills up after sunset. Friday and Saturday evenings are worst. Couples crowd the south wall for city-light photos, and the parking lot fills by 7pm. Go at opening, noon on weekdays, and you might have the Zeiss telescope to yourself. The copper-domed roof glows warm orange in late-afternoon light, and on a still evening you can hear coyotes calling from the canyon below Fern Dell Drive.

La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard in Mid-City is the thing in Los Angeles that exists nowhere else on earth at this scale. Methane still bubbles through 10,000-year-old asphalt seeps in the park, and on warm days the air carries a petroleum smell you can pick up from 50 metres away. The museum holds over 3.5 million specimens pulled from Pit 91 and surrounding excavations since 1913. Saber-toothed cat skulls. Dire wolf skeletons arranged in rows of hundreds. The $15 adult ticket covers everything. The museum completed a renovation in 2024, and the new exhibition halls feel sharper than the previous layout. Researchers still pull bones from the active excavation site most weekdays between 9am and 5pm, visible through glass walls. That ongoing science, right beside Wilshire traffic, is difficult to find elsewhere.

A common first-day mistake in Los Angeles is trying to combine Hollywood Boulevard, the Getty, and Santa Monica Pier in one outing. The basin stretches 70 km from Long Beach to the San Fernando Valley. Driving from Hollywood to Brentwood takes 35 minutes in theory but 50 to 80 minutes on a weekday between 7am and 7pm. Pick one area per half-day. If you land at LAX, the Getty Center is 20 km north on the 405, roughly 25 minutes outside rush hour, and it makes a strong first stop. Your body likely still runs on an earlier timezone, and a quiet hilltop museum is less punishing than a loud boardwalk. Save Griffith Observatory for day two, paired with the Los Feliz neighborhood below it. HomeState on Vermont Avenue does a solid breakfast burrito for around $14, and you'll want food before the walk up from the Fern Dell trailhead, a 40-minute hike through eucalyptus shade to the observatory.