LOS ANGELES -- The first time I paid Los Angeles a visit, I was not even aware that it had happened. In fact, I had vowed to stay far away from this infamous sea of tawdriness, bad taste, ugly architecture, pollution, commercial entertainment and urban violence.

It had been a spectacular drive down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco, a week of natural beauty in my lackadaisical late 20s, and I was determined to turn inland before I plunged into the blight of L.A.

After many miles of impressive canyons, forests and seascapes, I began passing telltale minimalls and stucco apartment blocks, and I hightailed it back northward.

I now realize that my trip had taken me, unawares, deep into the centre of Los Angeles. And this should have taught me two lessons: The first, reinforcing my preconceptions, is that even the heart of L.A. is built in a way that would be called "outskirts" in other cities. And second, contrary to my prejudices, is that much of L.A. consists of large tracts of unspoiled nature: Amid the 80 towns of the Los Angeles basin are dozens of state parks offering extremes of mountain, desert, forest, ocean and subtropical solitude, probably more open space than any other city of its size.

L.A. is not known for those glades, but for the 12 million people stuffed between them. This is a city built entirely of human activity, almost devoid of history, monuments or architectural tableaus. To enjoy Los Angeles today is to enjoy the cut and thrust of human society in the first decade of this century - a delight not shared by all.

If you believe that this is a great historical moment, then you will find much to enjoy in L.A.: It is to our time to be what Florence, London and New York were to the 16th, 19th and 20th centuries. When you visit those cities today, you are visiting museums, sterilized temples to former glories; the sweat, hassle and unleavened appearance of L.A. today, just like those cities in their early moments, is a result of its active, embryonic nature.

It is a place that is still inventing itself.

It is shocking how quickly L.A. changes: If you knew it a decade ago, you would not recognize it today. Then, it was known for a series of human and natural disasters, for post-industrial blight and racial disharmony. But, as North America's main port of entry and America's principal point of escape, L.A. flushes itself out with hundreds of thousands of new residents every few years.

This is a very good moment to visit the city: The 1990s boom has brought a lively mood to formerly desolate street scenes; the age of urban sprawl has ended and turned on its tail, bringing neglected neighbourhoods, such as Hollywood and Santa Monica, back into vogue.

Last week, on the Fourth of July, I experienced this renaissance in spectacular and subtle fashion. I spent a long night on Ozone Avenue in Venice Beach, a residential street that a few years ago was a dangerous and barren slum, ignored by all but the abject. On that night, this rediscovered neighbourhood of artists, bon vivants and intellectuals was a grand outdoor festival, a movable feast of music, food and frivolity that brought to mind an Andalusian village during a fiesta, Paris during a student strike, Greenwich Village in its better moments.

To feel the full buzz of the new L.A., you must experience it in the warmth of the late evening, under the luscious purple sky, with native Angelinos in full feather. People here, regardless of their culture, are enormously generous and forthcoming, the flip side of their infamous road rage. This is a place where people talk to strangers, and reveal all their secrets.

This ebullient civic culture used to be hidden in back yards and restaurant patios; today, once again, it has exploded onto the streets: See it on the Santa Monica pier, in the Spanish-speaking megalopolis that stretches eastward from downtown, in the undiscovered subway stations, the teeming beach boardwalks, the chicken-and-waffle joints of South Central. Nobody is a tourist here: The only way to observe is by participating.

Times to visit

Contrary to mythology, Los Angeles actually does have seasons: It can be rainy and chilly in December, January and February, and the midsummer months, utterly without precipitation, become unbearably hot, smog-filled and dusty. The best times to visit are the transitional months, for both climatic and human reasons.

In spring, the entire city is abloom with bougainvilleas, jacarandas and magnolias; the air is perfumed, and on sunny days after a light rain, the air seems crystalline and the mountains glow in the distance. To experience L.A. at its most joyous, come during one of the two great fiestas: The Cinco de Mayo, a street party that takes up the first week of May, and the Day of the Dead, in early November.

A great 24 hours

Sunset Boulevard forms the spine of L.A., and a day-long trip along its entire length will give you a full banquet of the city's flavours. Begin early in Downtown L.A. (try staying at the historic Biltmore Hotel, a splendid throwback to L.A.'s Raymond Chandler days) and start your morning on Broadway, an extraordinary avenue you won't find in tourist guides. It looks like New York in the 1930s, all art deco skyscrapers and sidewalk action, but it takes place almost entirely in Spanish. Visit the wonderful Central Market, enjoy a Mexican breakfast at one of its great food stalls and head across the street to the Bradbury Building, one of the 19th century's architectural marvels, the structure that inspired Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner. Spend some time in one of the nearby Mexican potion shops, where you can bring doom to a lover's boyfriend or rescue your uncle from hell.

Get in your car (you can't be in L.A. without a car), and pull off Broadway onto Sunset's headwaters, here known as Cesar Chavez Boulevard. You'll pass Chinatown, still gritty and thriving and filled with good art galleries and better dim sum, and enter some of L.A.'s poorest neighbourhoods: Rampart and Echo Park, devoid of vegetation and shelter.

Sunset will curve through a series of hills and enter Silver Lake, which became the city's most recent hipster community in the 1990s. Stop and stroll amid lively cafés, strange antique shops and great live-music bars, where the likes of Beck got their start. On the residential streets, you'll see some of the best high-modernist architecture of the mid-20th century.

Next, you'll pass through the bizarre panorama of Hollywood, which is both one of L.A.'s most impoverished neighbourhoods and one of its most opulent - and certainly its most famous.

There is plenty of Old Hollywood history to see along this stretch. (It's worth detouring a block north to Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and La Brea - the tawdry old street is beginning to come back to life, but still has plenty of wonderful sleaze.)

Hold your appetite until you pass Laurel Canyon Drive, at which point you're on the storied Sunset Strip, which remains a youthful stretch of restaurants, nightspots, shops, stoned teenagers and Eurotrash flâneurs whiling away their inheritances. Eat at the Standard Hotel's lunch counter, a diner built by a rave designer, or at the Cajun Bistro, where Woody met Annie in Annie Hall.

The next, long leg of your drive will take you through the most opulent neighbourhoods on this side of the world: Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades. Stop for a martini at the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Bar, and a few kilometres later stop at Will Rogers State Park to watch some actual polo. You'll wish you had a good sports car, or at least a convertible, as the road is twisty and the scenery is splendid.

Sunset disgorges itself onto the Pacific Coast Highway just north of Santa Monica, hopefully just before the real-life sunset. From here, you can take two paths, depending on your tastes: northward into deepest Malibu, for a long stroll on the beach, dinner at the flawless casual Italian tables of Allegria, and a night at a beachside motel; or south into Venice Beach, to experience the teeming carnival scene along the boardwalk, eat at one of hundreds of hole-in-the-wall beaneries and crash in Santa Monica.

Best street food

The most delicious food concoction on this side of the continent is the fish taco at Tacos Baja Ensenada on Whittier Boulevard, deep in the Mexican barrio of East L.A. It is a long journey from anywhere you're likely to be staying, but well worth it - not just for the friendly street scenes of fruit vendors, communion-dress stores, fortunetellers and pinata dealerships, but also for this unassuming restaurant's 69-cent wonders. Put aside your preconceptions about both fish and tacos, and order two or three of these sublime alchemies of haddock, crème fraîche and spicy vegetables.

You will never forget the experience.

Los Angeles is best understood through its restaurants. Nobody cooks at home here, giving the city's neighbourhoods, rich and poor, the highest concentration of eateries in the world.

As it's a pure immigrant's town, every nationality is well represented, as well as endless hybrids: The Thai-Peruvian restaurant, the kosher Japanese deli, the Brazilian pizzeria.

The line between fast food and haute cuisine is forever blurred, as the town's five-dollar beaneries develop surprising gourmet touches and L.A.'s many star chefs prefer to work in casual environments (my fine-dining favourite is Campanile on La Brea Avenue, where Charlie Chaplin's old studio has become a shrine to both impeccable Mediterranean cuisine and to the art of unaffected mass dining).

There are a number of cheap-eating experiences not to be missed: The fried chicken and waffles at Roscoe's in the 'hood, the 100 flavours of taco along Broadway (try to steer clear of the tongue, brain and tripe varieties), the inventive Cajun at Netty's in Silver Lake, the historic steaks at Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard (virtually unchanged since 1911), the all-night hot dogs at Pink's, where Orson Welles once ate 17 chili dogs at one sitting, the escalating burger wars between Astro Burger, Fatburger and In-n-Out. Fast food was invented here, and is still executed with a finesse and inventive drive that make it feel like grand dining.

Shopping

Perhaps you did not know that L.A. is a great city for bookstores (Angelenos buy more books per capita than anyone else in the United States). Truly great browsing can be found at Skylight books in funky Los Feliz, Midnight Special on Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, and especially at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip.

Of course, you didn't come here to look at books. You came here to look at frocks and shoes, and like so many gullible visitors, you were drawn to stare at the five-figure price tags and horse-faced matrons along Rodeo Drive. Of all the shopping orgies here, this one is worth missing: All the worst aspects of New York's Fifth Avenue and Toronto's Bloor Street, fortified with unseemly amounts of Saudi Arabian wealth.

Back on earth, you'll see dozens of still-expensive but much more tasteful designers along Robertson Boulevard, where the real fashionistas reign. Or, for more youthful pleasures, along Melrose Avenue, westward from La Brea, where fine little cafés are interspersed with hundreds of clothing boutiques, many of them trashy and pointless but a few of them impressive.

Fred Segal reigns supreme here, and also don't miss Decades (for vintage Hollywood duds), Agent Provocateur (for very risqué undies) and Necromance (for shocking accessories).

The Sunset Strip remains a great shopping stroll, for haute clothing as well as CDs and books. And the streets of Venice, especially Abbott Kinney Boulevard, have become a rich vein of inventive, affordable clothing and design.

In fact, the word "design" is held in the sort of awe here that "theatre" is in New York. Entire districts are filled with stores and malls devoted to star designers - their outpourings usually a mix of doodads, trivets, ingenious decorations, pill boxes and kitchen accessories. The best assortment of these endlessly distracting boutiques is along Hollywood's Third Street, east of La Cienega.

Over- and underrated

Pay absolutely no heed to the movie-studio theme parks, Disneyland, Knott's Berry Farm and Six Flags, and don't be bothered with tours of stars' homes or any Hollywood Boulevard museums. For stargazing, you're much better off grabbing an early dinner on Melrose or at the Standard, where real-life stars really do occasionally nosh. Better yet, give yourself a tour of one of the storied star cemeteries (Hollywood Forever is more impressive and navigable than Forest Lawn). For a free thrill that beats any theme park, visit the Getty Museum at dusk. Don't bother looking at the lacklustre art collection, most of which is old hat to seasoned gallery-goers (and some of it is suspected of being fake); far more compelling is the splendid travertine building and gardens, which offer the best view of the sunset in town.

Instead of roller coasters, you absolutely must get in your car and take one of the three great drives of L.A.: up the Pacific Coast Highway, along the crest of the Hollywood Hills on Mulholland Drive (stop at Runyon Canyon Park for the best view of the city), or along the Angeles Crest Highway for an alpine drive that will take you into pristine mountain forests less than an hour from the city. In a town built on illusions, this instant escape into nature is hard to top.

For information, contact the Los Angeles Convention & Visitors Bureau at (213) 689-8822 or www.lacvb.com.