Los Angeles (often shortened as LA or L.A.) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Southern California. With an estimated 3.87 million residents within the city limits as of 2025, it is the second-most populous city in the United States, behind New York City, and the largest city in the Western United States. The city has an ethnically and culturally diverse population, and is the principal city of a metropolitan area of 12.9 million people (2024). Greater Los Angeles, a combined statistical area that includes the Los Angeles and Riverside–San Bernardino metropolitan areas, is a sprawling metropolis of over 18 million residents.
The majority of the city proper lies in the Los Angeles Basin adjacent to the Pacific Ocean in the west and extending partly through the Santa Monica Mountains and north into the San Fernando Valley, with the city bordering the San Gabriel Valley to its east. It covers about 469 square miles (1,210 km2), and is the county seat and most populated city of Los Angeles County, which is the most populous county in the United States with an estimated 9.86 million residents as of 2022. It is the third-most visited city in the U.S. (after New York City and Miami), with over 3.6 million visitors as of 2023.
The area that became Los Angeles was originally inhabited by the indigenous Tongva people and later claimed by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo for Spain in 1542. The city was founded on September 4, 1781, under Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, on the village of Yaanga. It became a part of the First Mexican Empire in 1821 following the Mexican War of Independence. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican–American War, Los Angeles and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and became part of the United States. Los Angeles was incorporated as a municipality on April 4, 1850, five months before California achieved statehood. The discovery of oil in the 1890s brought rapid growth to the city. The city was further expanded with the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which delivers water from Eastern California.
Los Angeles has a diverse economy with a broad range of industries. Despite a decline in film production, it is the oldest and one of the largest hubs of film and television production. It has one of the busiest container ports in the Americas. Despite an exodus of commerce and an increasingly unreliable water supply, Downtown Los Angeles is evolving as a cultural center with the world's largest showcase of architecture designed by Frank Gehry. In 2024, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had a gross metropolitan product of over $1.295 trillion, making it the city with the third-largest GDP in the world, after New York and Tokyo. Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics in 1932 and 1984, and will host the games for a third time in 2028.
Toponymy
On September 4, 1781, a group of 44 settlers known as "Los Pobladores" founded the pueblo (town) they called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, 'The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels'. The original name of the settlement is disputed; the Guinness Book of World Records rendered it as "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula"; other sources have shortened or alternate versions of the longer name.
The local English pronunciation of the name of the city has varied over time. A 1953 article in the journal of the American Name Society asserts that the pronunciation lawss AN-jəl-əs was established following the 1850 incorporation of the city and that since the 1880s the pronunciation lohss ANG-gəl-əs emerged from a trend in California to give places Spanish (or Spanish-sounding) names and pronunciations. In 1908, librarian Charles Fletcher Lummis, who argued for the name's pronunciation with a hard g (), reported that there were at least 12 pronunciation variants. In the early 1900s, the Los Angeles Times advocated for pronouncing it Loce AHNG-hayl-ais (), approximating Spanish [los ˈaŋxeles], by printing the respelling under its masthead for several years. This did not find favor.
Since the 1930s, has been most common. In 1934, the United States Board on Geographic Names decreed that this pronunciation be used by the federal government. This was also endorsed in 1952 by a "jury" appointed by Mayor Fletcher Bowron to devise an official pronunciation.
History
Indigenous history
The settlement of Indigenous Californians in the modern Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley was dominated by the Tongva (now also known as the Gabrieleño since the era of Spanish colonization). The historic center of Tongva power in the region was the settlement of Yaanga (Tongva: Iyáangẚ), meaning "place of the poison oak", which would eventually become the site where the Spanish founded the Pueblo de Los Ángeles. Iyáangẚ has also been translated as "the valley of smoke".
Spanish rule
In 1542, maritime explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo claimed the present-day area of southern California for the Spanish Empire during an official military expedition northward along the Pacific coast from New Spain. Gaspar de Portolà and Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí reached the present site of Los Angeles on August 2, 1769.
In 1771, Franciscan friar Junípero Serra directed the building of the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, the first mission in the area. On September 4, 1781, a group of 44 settlers known as "Los Pobladores" founded the pueblo (town) they called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, 'The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels'. The present-day city has the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the United States. Two-thirds of the Mexican or (New Spain) settlers were mestizo or mulatto, a mixture of African, indigenous, and European ancestry. There was even one Asian Filipino from Manila (Antonio Miranda Rodríguez) who was reassigned to nearby Santa Barbara which was a fortress that needed his gun-smithing skills more. The settlement remained a small ranch town for decades, but by 1820, the population had increased to about 650 residents. Today, the pueblo is commemorated in the historic district of Los Angeles Pueblo Plaza and Olvera Street, the oldest part of Los Angeles.
Mexican rule
New Spain achieved its independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, after which the pueblo existed within the Mexican Republic. During Mexican rule, Governor Pío Pico made Los Angeles the regional capital of Alta California. By this time, the new republic introduced more secularization acts within the Los Angeles region. In 1846, during the Mexican–American War, marines from the United States occupied the pueblo. This resulted in the siege of Los Angeles, where 150 Mexican militias fought the occupiers, who eventually surrendered.
Mexican rule ended following the American Conquest of California, part of the larger Mexican-American War. Americans took control from the Californios after a series of battles, culminating with the signing of the Treaty of Cahuenga on January 13, 1847. The Mexican Cession was formalized in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ceded Los Angeles and the rest of Alta California to the United States.
Post-Conquest era
Railroads arrived with the completion of the Southern Pacific line from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 1876 and the Santa Fe Railroad in 1885. Petroleum was discovered in the city and surrounding area in 1892, and by 1923, the discoveries helped California become the country's largest oil producer, accounting for about one-quarter of the world's petroleum output.
By 1900, the population had grown to more than 102,000, putting pressure on the city's water supply. The completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, under the supervision of William Mulholland, ensured the continued growth of the city. Because of clauses in the city's charter that prevented the City of Los Angeles from selling or providing water from the aqueduct to any area outside its borders, many adjacent cities and communities felt compelled to join Los Angeles.
Los Angeles created the first municipal zoning ordinance in the United States. On September 14, 1908, the Los Angeles City Council promulgated residential and industrial land use zones. The new ordinance established three residential zones of a single type, where industrial uses were prohibited. The proscriptions included barns, lumber yards, and any industrial land use employing machine-powered equipment. These laws were enforced against industrial properties after the fact. These prohibitions were in addition to existing activities that were already regulated as nuisances. These included explosives warehousing, gas works, oil drilling, slaughterhouses, and tanneries. Although the council designated seven industrial zones, exemptions granted between 1908 and 1915 permitted industrial development within designated residential areas. There are two differences between the 1908 Residence District Ordinance and later zoning laws in the United States. First, the 1908 laws did not establish a comprehensive zoning map as the 1916 New York City Zoning Ordinance did. Second, the residential zones did not distinguish types of housing; they treated apartments, hotels, and detached single-family housing equally.
In 1910, Hollywood merged into Los Angeles, with 10 movie companies already operating in the city at the time. By 1921, more than 80 percent of the world's film industry was concentrated in L.A. The money generated by the industry kept the city insulated from much of the economic loss suffered by the rest of the country during the Great Depression.
By 1930, the population surpassed one million. In 1932, the city hosted the Summer Olympics.
Post–World War II
During the Second World War, Los Angeles became a major center of wartime manufacturing, such as shipbuilding and aircraft. Calship built hundreds of Liberty Ships and Victory Ships on Terminal Island, and the Los Angeles area was the headquarters of six of the country's major aircraft manufacturers (Douglas Aircraft Company, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed, North American Aviation, Northrop Corporation, and Vultee). During the war, more aircraft were produced in one year than in all the pre-war years since the Wright brothers flew their first airplane in 1903, combined. Manufacturing in Los Angeles skyrocketed, and as William S. Knudsen, of the National Defense Advisory Commission, put it, "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible."
Following World War II, a major influx of new residents and the expansion of defense and aerospace industries accelerated Los Angeles' urbanization. The resulting metropolitan growth caused the city to expand rapidly, sprawling northwest into the San Fernando Valley. The expansion of the state owned Interstate Highway System during the 1950s and 1960s helped propel suburban growth and signaled the demise of the city's privately owned electrified rail system, once the world's largest.
As a consequence of World War II, suburban growth, and population density, many amusement parks were built and operated in this area. An example is Beverly Park, which was located at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega before being closed and replaced by the Beverly Center.
In the late 20th century, Los Angeles substantially reduced the amount of housing that could be built by drastically downzoning the city. In 1960, the city had a total zoned capacity for approximately 10 million people. By 1990, that capacity had fallen to 4.5 million as a result of policy decisions to ban housing through zoning.
Racial tensions led to the Watts riots in 1965, resulting in 34 deaths and over 1,000 injuries.
In 1969, California became the birthplace of the Internet, as the first ARPANET transmission was sent from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park.
In 1973, Tom Bradley was elected as the city's first African American mayor, serving for five terms until retiring in 1993. Other events in the city during the 1970s included the Symbionese Liberation Army's South Central standoff in 1974 and the Hillside Stranglers murder cases in 1977–1978.
In early 1984, the city surpassed Chicago in population to become the second-largest city in the United States.
In 1984, the city hosted the Summer Olympic Games for the second time. Despite being boycotted by 14 Communist countries, the 1984 Olympics became more financially successful than any previous, and the second Olympics to turn a profit; the other, according to an analysis of contemporary newspaper reports, was the 1932 Summer Olympics, also held in Los Angeles.
Racial tensions erupted on April 29, 1992, with the acquittal by a Simi Valley jury of four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers captured on videotape beating Rodney King, culminating in large-scale riots.
In 1994, the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake shook the city, causing $12.5 billion in damage and 72 deaths. The century ended with the Rampart scandal, one of the most extensive documented cases of police misconduct in American history.
21st century
In 2002, Mayor James Hahn led the campaign against secession, resulting in voters defeating efforts by the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood to secede from the city.
In 2022, Karen Bass became the city's first female mayor, making Los Angeles the largest U.S. city to have ever had a woman as mayor.
In January 2025, a series of devastating wildfires caused by severe winds swept through Southern California, with the Pacific Palisades fire causing widespread destruction in Los Angeles's northwestern community of Pacific Palisades, with many calling it the most destructive in the history of the city of Los Angeles.
In June 2025, the city experienced protests and riots following raids by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Trump administration has targeted Los Angeles over its sanctuary city status, sending in hundreds of federal agents to apprehend undocumented immigrants. Trump also dispatched the Army National Guard and US Marines without the consent of local governments.
Los Angeles will host the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, making Los Angeles the third city to host the Olympics three times, after London and Paris.
Geography
Topography
The city of Los Angeles covers a total area of 502.7 square miles (1,302 km2), comprising 468.7 square miles (1,214 km2) of land and 34.0 square miles (88 km2) of water. The city extends for 44 miles (71 km) from north to south and for 29 miles (47 km) from east to west. The perimeter of the city is 342 miles (550 km).