Los Angeles

Walking into the building costs nothing; only the planetarium charges admission. Parking on the hill is scarce and charged, sending plenty of people up on foot instead. Since 1935 the terms have held that any citizen may look through the telescope.

Cars stop below and a driverless tram carries you up to the buildings. The garden at the centre is cut as a descending spiral, so its interior shows from every side. The cladding is Italian travertine, set with its fossil-shell faces turned outward.

Black asphalt still pushes bubbles up through lawns in the city centre. Ice-age animals sank into that stickiness and left their bones, wolves and sabre-toothed cats above all. Digging goes on, so inside the fence you watch people sieving the dirt.

A sign on the deck marks the end of Route 66, which starts back in Chicago. The Ferris wheel runs on sunlight and changes colour once the evening lights come on.

A few canals dug a century ago in imitation of Venice survive inside the housing streets. The boardwalk carries an open-air weights pen where people lift iron beside the sand. Stalls and street acts line the rest. After sunset long stretches go unlit.

Not all of these stars belong to actors. Five categories run here beside film, taking in television, radio, recording and live theatre, and the count has passed two thousand seven hundred. Look up the block list before you go hunting.

The hall has traded on the ground floor of the same building since 1917. New counters have wedged themselves between old butchers and spice sellers, so prices swing widely within a single aisle.

The tram circuit through the backlot, rather than the rides, is what this place was built on. It threads between sets that are still in use, so the route bends around the shooting schedule and two trips on one ticket rarely pass the same things.

The curved stainless steel skin was finished in 2003. At first the panels threw light back like mirrors and warmed the flats across the road, so several faces were sanded down to kill the shine. The upper garden stays open on concert-free afternoons.

This lane is where the city first settled. It was rebuilt as a Mexican market street in 1930; before that it was a back alley of stables and warehouses. The Avila Adobe along it, built of mud brick in 1818, is reckoned the oldest surviving house in the city.

Put up in 1923 as HOLLYWOODLAND to sell house lots, it lost the LAND in 1949. Fences stop anyone reaching the letters themselves; the lawn of Lake Hollywood Park gives the closest upward view.

A museum of Greek and Roman antiquities on a hillside above the Malibu coast, modelled on a Roman country house at Herculaneum. Entry costs nothing, yet a timed reservation must be made first. Closed by the 2025 Palisades fire, it reopened that June.

Chris Burden's 2008 work: 202 vintage street lamps in rows on Wilshire Boulevard outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is outdoors and costs nothing to wander through. The lamps light at sunset, when many people set up tripods for night shots.

A contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue across from Disney Concert Hall, with free general admission. Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room takes bookings separately, and each visitor gets only a short, fixed stay inside.

In San Marino, beside Pasadena. The library holds a Gutenberg Bible and the gallery hangs Gainsborough's The Blue Boy. Allow half a day for the sprawling desert and Chinese gardens; it shuts on Tuesdays.

The cinema opened in 1927 as Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Stars' handprints and footprints are pressed into the forecourt cement, and many visitors lay their own hands in them. The forecourt needs no ticket.

The Japanese quarter east of downtown, one of three Japantowns left in California. The Japanese American National Museum covers wartime incarceration. The streets are busiest during the Nisei Week festival in August.

Korean signs line Wilshire Boulevard through the neighbourhood. Barbecue joints and jjimjilbang bathhouses keep serving until nearly dawn, and the Wiltern, a blue-green Art Deco theatre from 1931, holds the corner. Three Purple Line stations serve it.

A railway station opened in 1939, mixing Spanish Mission style with Art Deco. The waiting room keeps its leather chairs and timber ceiling and often appears in films. Olvera Street sits opposite, an easy pairing on foot.

A cluster of towers the Italian immigrant Simon Rodia raised alone from steel rod and mortar between 1921 and 1954. Broken tile, bottle glass and seashells are pressed into the surfaces. You can see the whole group from beyond the fence.

Opened in 1962 in Chavez Ravine, it is one of Major League Baseball's oldest parks still in use. The San Gabriel Mountains rise beyond the outfield, and sunset games look their best. On game days a shuttle bus runs from Union Station.

An open-air amphitheatre staging shows since 1922, known for its shell of concentric arches. The LA Phil plays the summer season, and at most concerts you may carry in a picnic and wine and eat dinner in your seat.

The first Disney park, opened in 1955 in Anaheim to the southeast, and the only one Walt Disney saw completed. California Adventure across the plaza is ticketed separately, so hopping between the two in a day takes a two-park ticket.

An office building from 1893 whose iron railings and open-cage lifts sit exposed beneath a glass skylight, which put it in Blade Runner. Only the ground-floor lobby is open to visitors; the upper floors are offices and roped off.