Los Angeles Guide
Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains
Home to some of LA's most expensive real estate, MALIBU and the SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS comprise a sweeping terrain relatively free from smog and crime, representing the contemporary good life in Southern California. Any Angeleno lucky enough to make it almost immediately tries to move here. The area features some of LA's most picturesque scenery, its rambling canyons, striking valleys, and dense forests making up a surprisingly large, pristine wilderness amid the metropolis.
Ironically, the town and mountains are also under constant threat from natural dangers, built on eroding cliffs forever sliding into the ocean and blackened by summer hillside fires, which leave a slick residue of burnt chaparral – a perfect surface for the catastrophic floods and mudslides that come just a few months later. The periodic arrival of El Niño– driven wet weather only makes the situation more dire, with watery calamities a constant, inescapable threat, sometimes with whole neighborhoods being washed away.
From Pacific Palisades, a chic district just northwest of Santa Monica, to rustic Topanga Canyon, a wooded neighborhood with an artistic flair, to beautiful Point Dume, a whale-watching promontory, these areas are best navigated by car on the popular beachside motorway, the Pacific Coast Highway (also known as "PCH" or Highway 1). North of PCH, Mulholland Highway provides an alternative trip through the area, winding through the Santa Monica Mountains and skipping Malibu entirely, instead reaching the ocean less than a mile from LA County's distant northwest boundary – at one of its prime spots for surfing.