Free things to do in Los Angeles are far more plentiful than the city’s reputation suggests. Everyone assumes LA runs on valet parking and £8 oat lattes, and honestly, parts of it do. But I’ve lived here long enough to know you can fill a full week without paying for a single attraction — proper stuff too, not just “walk around and look at things” (though there’s plenty of that, and it’s good). Below is where I’d send a friend who asked. And people do ask, constantly.
Griffith Observatory and the Park Around It
Start here. The Observatory is free — the exhibits, the public telescopes, the lot. That surprises people every time, because it looks like the sort of place that should charge £25 and funnel you through a gift shop. Sunset is the popular hour, when the whole terrace fills with people photographing the skyline going pink, and yes, it’s crowded, but it earns the crowds. They also run free star-gazing events on select evenings; check the calendar before you go rather than turning up hopeful.
Griffith Park itself deserves a full day. It’s one of the largest urban parks in the country, and the trails, picnic areas and viewpoints cost nothing. My favourite oddity is the Old LA Zoo — abandoned animal enclosures from the original zoo, now just sitting there in the hillside for anyone to wander through. It’s strange and slightly eerie and completely free, and it’s one of the better photo spots in the city precisely because it doesn’t look like anywhere else.
If you want the Hollywood Sign, hike to it from the Griffith Park trails rather than driving into the residential streets below it. The locals up there are, understandably, fed up. Stay on the marked trails, bring more water than you think you need, and if you can’t be bothered hiking at all, the Observatory lawn gives you a perfectly respectable view of the sign anyway.
The Walk of Fame and the Chinese Theatre
I’ll be honest with you: the Hollywood Walk of Fame is a bit grubby. It’s also free, iconic, and worth an hour. There are over 2,700 stars along Hollywood Blvd, and hunting down a favourite name is genuinely fun. The stretch near the Dolby Theatre — where the Oscars happen — is the best bit for photos.
The TCL Chinese Theatre courtyard, with all the celebrity handprints and footprints pressed into concrete, is free to walk through as well. Go early. By midday you’re competing with tour groups and costumed characters who’d quite like a tip for appearing in your photo. Before 10am it’s almost peaceful.
The Hollywood Bowl Without a Ticket
This one’s a proper local trick. On non-performance days you can park for free and simply walk around the amphitheatre — sit in the seats, take in the scale of the place, all of it. Even better, the LA Phil sometimes rehearses on weekday mornings and the public can watch for nothing. It depends on the schedule, so it’s not guaranteed, but stumbling into a free rehearsal of a world-class orchestra is a very good morning.
The Hollywood Bowl Museum is also free, with memorabilia and exhibits covering the venue’s history — The Beatles played here, so did basically everyone else.
The Always-Free Museums (There Are Loads)
This is where LA quietly embarrasses most other cities. A remarkable number of serious museums here charge nothing at all:
- The Getty Center — free admission, full stop. World-class art, Richard Meier’s architecture, the gardens, and views stretching to the ocean on a clear day. You take a free tram up from the car park, which children treat as an attraction in itself. Parking costs money, but that’s it.
- The Getty Villa in Malibu — the classical antiquities sibling, built like a Roman villa, also free.
- The Broad — free general admission to the permanent collection, with Kusama, Koons and the rest. Book a timed slot online well ahead; the Infinity Room has its own arrangements.
- MOCA Grand Avenue — free, and it’s directly across the road from The Broad, so do both in one afternoon.
- Hammer Museum in Westwood — free daily, with excellent rotating shows plus free talks and screenings.
- California African American Museum in Exposition Park — free admission, consistently strong exhibitions.
- ICA LA in the Arts District — always free, more experimental, and you can pair it with the free galleries nearby like Hauser & Wirth and Art Share L.A.
The Getty is the one I push hardest. I took my mum when she visited one damp January Tuesday — we’d budgeted the morning and stayed until they were practically sweeping us out at closing, having spent nothing beyond the parking and two coffees. She still talks about the cactus garden. In January.
The California Science Center deserves its own mention: the main permanent exhibits — World of Life, Ecosystems, Air & Space — are free, and it’s a full day out with kids. Special exhibits and the IMAX are ticketed extras, but you can skip those without anyone feeling short-changed. While you’re in Exposition Park, the CAAM is next door.
Downtown, the Central Library is worth visiting purely as a building — free docent-led tours cover the architecture, the murals and the history, and the rotunda is one of the loveliest interiors in the city.
Free Days and the Small Print
Then there’s the second tier: museums that charge, but not always, and not for everyone.
LACMA is the big one. It’s free for LA County residents on weekday afternoons after 3pm, free for everyone on the second Tuesday of each month, and always free for under-17s. Even without a ticket, the outdoor stuff is open to all — Urban Light, the forest of vintage lamp posts, is probably the most photographed spot in LA and costs nothing. Jazz at LACMA runs free outdoor concerts on Friday evenings from April to November, and it’s one of the nicest standing weekly events in the city. Bring a blanket.
The Natural History Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits both offer free times for LA County residents too. And here’s the bit visitors miss: the actual tar pits — the bubbling asphalt lakes, the outdoor excavation sites — are viewable for free regardless. You can watch Ice Age palaeontology happening in the middle of a city park without paying a penny. The museum indoors is the paid part.
The Huntington in San Marino does monthly free days with advance online booking, and I won’t sugar-coat it: those reservations vanish fast. Set a reminder. Descanso Gardens runs occasional free and discount days on a similar system.
Two lesser-known routes worth knowing. LA library cardholders can access free museum passes through the libraries’ pass programmes — genuinely useful and weirdly under-publicised. And several museums offer free or heavily reduced entry to visitors with EBT/SNAP cards, so it’s always worth asking at the desk. The Korean Cultural Center on the Miracle Mile is another quiet favourite of mine — free galleries of traditional and contemporary Korean art, plus free film screenings with English subtitles.
Downtown LA on Foot, for Nothing
DTLA rewards walking more than any other part of the city, which is a sentence that would have sounded mad twenty years ago. Start at El Pueblo de Los Angeles, the historic district where the city was founded. Olvera Street is free to wander — a Mexican marketplace with vendors, live music and regular cultural events. The Avila Adobe, the oldest standing house in LA, is free to tour, and it takes fifteen minutes and is quietly wonderful. La Plaza de Cultura y Artes covers Mexican American history and culture, also free, and you can see Siqueiros’ restored América Tropical mural nearby — a piece of art that was literally whitewashed over for decades and has its own interpretive space now.
From there, the Grand Avenue corridor packs The Broad, MOCA and Walt Disney Concert Hall into a few walkable blocks. The Concert Hall’s Gehry exterior is free to photograph from every angle — and when it’s offered, there’s a complimentary self-guided audio tour narrated by John Lithgow, which is more entertaining than it has any right to be. Grand Park sits just across from it all, with fountains, lawns and
Related Links
Free Things to Do in Los Angeles — LearnCalifornia
Los Angeles in July — LearnCalifornia
free public events throughout the year — concerts, festivals, New Year’s Eve celebrations. The Original Farmers Market over on Fairfax is technically free too; you’ll only spend money if the food gets you, which it will, but nobody’s charging you at the door.
Beaches and the Coast, Which Cost Nothing By Design
The ocean is LA’s great equaliser. Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan, Hermosa, the Malibu beaches — all free to access. Parking is where they get you, so if you can walk, cycle or take the bus in, do that.
Venice Beach Boardwalk is the classic. Street performers, muscle men at Muscle Beach, pickup basketball, the skate park where you can watch genuinely brilliant skaters for as long as you like, murals everywhere. It’s loud and chaotic and occasionally a bit much, and I love it in doses of about two hours. Then walk a few blocks inland to the Venice Canals, which are the exact opposite — quiet residential walkways over little bridges, ducks, absurdly lovely houses. The tonal whiplash is part of the fun.
Santa Monica Pier is free to walk; you only pay if you fancy the rides. Sunset from the end of the pier is one of the great free experiences in the city, full stop.
If you’ve got a bike, the Marvin Braude Bike Trail — everyone calls it The Strand — runs 22 paved miles along the coast from Pacific Palisades down to Torrance, linking most of the beaches and piers above. Walking a stretch of it is just as good. I did the Santa Monica-to-Manhattan-Beach leg with a visiting friend last spring and we spent the grand total of nothing, plus one ice cream I refuse to count.
The Neighbourhoods Worth Wandering
Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills costs nothing to walk, and window-shopping there is a legitimate spectator sport. Nobody expects you to buy anything; half the people on the pavement are doing exactly what you’re doing.
Eastside, Echo Park Lake has free paths with a proper skyline view (the paddle boats cost extra, and honestly the view from the bank is better anyway). Silver Lake’s hidden public stairways are free urban hikes that locals use for fitness — steep, tucked between houses, and oddly satisfying to collect. Los Feliz makes a pleasant gateway to Griffith Park if you’re combining days.
Chinatown and Little Tokyo both reward slow wandering — plazas, markets, temples, public art, and frequent free cultural festivals if your timing’s right. And don’t skip South LA: Leimert Park Village is a genuine cultural hub with art, music and community events, much of it free, and the Watts Towers offer free exterior tours on certain days. Simon Rodia spent 33 years building those towers by hand out of steel, mortar and broken pottery, and standing under them is worth the drive on its own.
Free Concerts, Events and Telly
LA’s free events calendar is genuinely deep, especially in summer:
- Grand Performances downtown — free outdoor concerts with international acts
- Off the 405 at the Getty — free music on the terrace in the warmer months
- Summer Sounds in West Hollywood
- Jazz at LACMA, Fridays April to November, as mentioned
- Shakespeare in Griffith Park — the Independent Shakespeare Co. performs free at the Old Zoo amphitheatre in summer, donations welcome
Then there’s CicLAvia, which closes miles of streets to cars several times a year so cyclists, skaters and pedestrians can take over. Each edition covers a different neighbourhood, so it doubles as a way to explore parts of the city you’d never otherwise walk. It’s free, it’s brilliant, and it’s the closest LA gets to feeling like one connected place.
TV tapings deserve a mention too
TV tapings deserve a mention too. Late-night shows and sitcoms — Jimmy Kimmel Live! among them — give away audience tickets free online. Book ahead, expect to queue, and expect the taping to run longer than the finished episode. It’s a proper only-in-LA afternoon for the price of nothing.
Street Art, and the Properly Odd Stuff
The Arts District downtown is essentially a free open-air gallery — self-guided mural walks, big-name graffiti pieces, sculptures tucked around corners. Venice has its own dense cluster of murals along the boardwalk and back alleys. Even the Metro stations feature commissioned public art, which you can see for the cost of a fare you were paying anyway.
For the offbeat file: The Last Bookstore downtown is free to enter and wander — the book tunnel upstairs, the art installations, the sprawling used stacks. Buy something small if you can; places like this deserve to survive. Angels Flight, the “world’s shortest railway,” is free to look at and photograph, and only a dollar to actually ride, which barely counts as spending. Some of the city’s churches and temples run free architecture tours as well, hours permitting.
Making It All Work
A few practical bits. Use the Metro where you can — a lot of the free attractions cluster near stations, and parking is where a “free” day quietly turns into a £30 day. Griffith Park has free street parking on non-event days, but read the signage, because LA parking enforcement is ruthless and I’ve paid for that lesson twice.
Plan by neighbourhood rather than by attraction: DTLA museums plus Grand Park in one day, Exposition Park’s museums plus the free Rose Garden in another, Venice and Santa Monica together. Check the official museum calendars and event listings before you commit, because free days and rehearsal schedules shift. And if you live here, get a library card — between the pass programmes and the resident-only free hours, LA County residents have access to considerably more than tourists realise.
The honest truth about free things to do in Los Angeles is that you’ll run out of time before you run out of options. If you only take one thing from all of this, make it the Getty on a clear day — book nothing, pay for parking, and give it the whole afternoon. Everything else on this list will still be free tomorrow.
Further resources
For more ideas, see these curated lists of free activities and attractions:
100 free things to do in Los Angeles and free things to do in LA.
- Explore the Best Things to Do in Downtown LA
- Discover Top Tourist Spots in Los Angeles
- Check Out Fun and Quirky Things to Do in LA
- See the Best Attractions of Los Angeles
- Take a Tour of Hollywood While You’re in Town
