Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a large city on the Pacific coast of Southern California. It is the second biggest city in the United States by population, after New York City. About 3.9 million people live inside the city itself. Nearly 13 million live in the larger metro area around it. People often call the city "LA" for short, or "the City of Angels." The name comes from Spanish and means "the angels."

The city sits in a wide basin between the Pacific Ocean and the San Gabriel Mountains. The weather is warm and sunny most of the year. Rain is rare. In winter, you can sometimes ski in the nearby mountains in the morning and swim at the beach in the afternoon.

Los Angeles began as a small village of the Tongva people, who lived in the area for thousands of years. In 1781, Spanish settlers from Mexico founded a town there and gave it its Spanish name. Mexico ruled the town next, and then the United States took control in 1848 after the Mexican-American War. At that time, the town had only about 1,600 people. It grew slowly until the late 1800s, when railroads arrived and brought new settlers west.

Los Angeles is the capital of the movie industry. In the early 1900s, filmmakers moved from the East Coast to the LA neighborhood of Hollywood. The weather let them shoot outdoors all year. Soon the major studios, including Warner Bros., Paramount, and Universal, set up there. Today the Academy Awards, or Oscars, are held in Hollywood each year. The Walt Disney Company is also based in the LA area, and Disneyland sits just south of the city in Anaheim.

LA is famous for its traffic. The city grew up around cars, not subways, and most people drive everywhere. Its freeways stretch for hundreds of miles. During rush hour, a trip that takes 20 minutes with no traffic can take an hour and a half.

The city also sits on top of dangerous ground. Several earthquake faults run underneath it, including the famous San Andreas Fault nearby. Scientists agree that a huge earthquake, sometimes called "the Big One," will strike the region someday. They just cannot predict when.

Los Angeles is one of the most diverse cities on Earth. People there speak more than 200 languages. It has the largest population of Mexican Americans in the country, big Korean, Armenian, and Iranian neighborhoods, and communities from almost every part of the world. That mix shapes the city's food, music, and daily life.