The city's oldest nickname is older than the United States' hold on California. The pueblo's full name was El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles — the Town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels — given for a Marian feast day kept by the Franciscans, who had named the river for it twelve years before the settlers arrived. Over two centuries the town outgrew the long Spanish name, but the “Angels” stayed. Los Angeles has been the City of Angels since 1781, and everything that came later simply borrowed it.
The pobladores did not arrive on empty land. The Tongva people had lived in the basin for centuries, and the village of Yaanga stood near the chosen site; the pueblo was laid out on ground that was already home. Under the Spanish governor Felipe de Neve, the eleven founding families built their town beside the Porciúncula — the Los Angeles River — raising crops to supply the nearby presidios and missions, and drawing water through an open ditch, the Zanja Madre, that served the town for a century. A flood washed the first riverside settlement away around 1815, and the town was rebuilt a little higher, at the Old Plaza that anchors El Pueblo to this day.
Why People Visit Los Angeles
Travelers come for the climate, the coast, and the culture, but the quietest surprise is the history: a two-hundred-and-forty-year-old pueblo tucked into the middle of a modern metropolis. History and everyday life sit side by side here in a way few American cities can match, and the founding block asks nothing but a walk.
