Los Angeles

Los Angeles lives under the light the first film-makers came looking for, and it still lands on the hills every evening. This is the movie city: the handprints outside the TCL Chinese Theatre, the back lots of Universal Studios Hollywood. But it is a beach city first, a hundred kilometres of sand — the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier, the skaters and bodybuilders of the Venice Beach Boardwalk, the wide shore of Zuma Beach facing the Malibu surf. Half an hour separates the ocean from the brushy ridges of Runyon Canyon Park, or from the Griffith Observatory, where the city spreads out to the horizon. It is a place to eat as much as to look at: tacos from a pavement cart, Koreatown noodles, cut fruit dusted with chilli. There is no single centre, and each district belongs to a different country.