Greater Los Angeles involves metro Los Angeles as well as the Inland Empire and Ventura County

Los Angeles lies in a basin in Southern California, adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, with mountains as large as ten,000 ft (3,000 m), and deserts. The metropolis, which addresses about 469 square miles (1,210 km2), is the seat of Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States. The Los Angeles metropolitan location (MSA) is residence to thirteen.1 million people, making it the next-premier metropolitan spot in the nation right after New York. Greater Los Angeles includes metro Los Angeles as well as the Inland Empire and Ventura County. It is the 2nd most populous U.S. combined statistical spot, also soon after New York, with a 2015 estimate of eighteen.7 million people.

Property to the Chumash and Tongva, the region that grew to become Los Angeles was claimed by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo for Spain in 1542. The town was started on September 4, 1781, underneath Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, on the village of Yaanga. It grew to become a component of Mexico in 1821 adhering to the Mexican War of Independence. In 1848, at the finish of the Mexican–American War, Los Angeles and the relaxation of California have been bought as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and thus grew to become component of the United States. Los Angeles was integrated as a municipality on April 4, 1850, 5 months before California achieved statehood. The discovery of oil in the eighteen nineties introduced quick progress to the town. The city was even more expanded with the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which delivers h2o from Eastern California.

The economic system of Los Angeles is driven by global trade, leisure (television, motion photographs, video video games, music recording, and manufacturing), aerospace, technologies, petroleum, vogue, clothing, and tourism. Other significant industries contain finance, telecommunications, legislation, health care, and transportation. In the 2017 Global Economic Centres Index, Los Angeles was rated as obtaining the 19th most competitive fiscal middle in the world, and sixth most competitive in the United States (soon after New York Metropolis, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C.).

1 of the five key movie studios, Paramount Photographs, is inside the metropolis boundaries, its area becoming portion of the so-called "Thirty-Mile Zone" of leisure headquarters in Southern California.

Los Angeles is the greatest manufacturing heart in the United States. The contiguous ports of Los Angeles and Long Seashore jointly comprise the busiest port in the United States by some measures and the fifth-busiest port in the globe, essential to trade inside of the Pacific Rim.

los angeles classifieds has a gross metropolitan solution of $1. trillion (as of 2017), making it the 3rd-biggest economic metropolitan location in the world, right after Tokyo and New York. Los Angeles has been classified an "alpha world town" according to a 2012 study by a team at Loughborough College.