Mulholland Drive Overlook

The drive is named for William Mulholland, the self-taught engineer who built the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the enormous system completed in 1913 that carried water more than two hundred miles from the Owens Valley to fuel the city's explosive growth. Mulholland was a hero to Los Angeles for making its rise possible, though the aqueduct also drained the Owens Valley and left a bitter legacy there that still runs deep.

The scenic road along the mountain crest opened in 1924 and was named in his honor. It was meant from the start as a pleasure drive, a way for a car-loving city to reach the ridge and take in the view, and it has served that purpose for a century.

The Santa Monica Mountains run right through the middle of Los Angeles, an unusual thing for a great city, a range of wild chaparral canyons dividing the metropolis in two. Mulholland Drive follows their spine, so its overlooks look down on both halves of the city at once.

From the north-facing pull-offs, the grid of the San Fernando Valley stretches to the distant mountains. From the south side, the view sweeps over Hollywood and the basin toward downtown's cluster of towers and, on the clearest days, a strip of Pacific blue. The Jerome C. Daniel Overlook, perched above the Hollywood Bowl, frames the Hollywood Sign and downtown together and is the most famous of them all.

Few roads carry as much cultural weight as Mulholland Drive. Winding past the gated estates of the Hollywood Hills, it became shorthand for movie-star glamour and for the dreamlike, sometimes sinister allure of Los Angeles itself, most famously in David Lynch's film that took the road as its name and its mood.

The overlooks have appeared in countless films, television shows, and photographs, the place where a character looks out over the city that will make or break them. Standing at a pull-off at night, with the whole basin flickering below, it is easy to feel why the road came to stand for the city's mix of promise and mystery.

For all the mansions and mythology, Mulholland runs through genuinely wild country. The Santa Monica Mountains are a national recreation area, and the canyons below the road hold coyotes, mule deer, bobcats, and even the occasional mountain lion, along with hawks riding the ridge thermals and spring wildflowers on the slopes.

This land is part of the ancestral homeland of the Tongva people, who lived across the Los Angeles basin for thousands of years and remain a living community. A short walk on one of the ridge trails off Mulholland trades the city view for coastal sage scrub and birdsong, a reminder that a strip of wilderness still runs down the middle of the second-largest city in the country.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.