Rancho Los Alamitos

On our list of the best activities in Los Angeles.

On a bluff above Long Beach, an adobe ranch house dates to the early 1800s, built on a site the Tongva had lived on for more than a thousand years before the Spanish arrived. Abel Stearns ran it as the country's largest cattle operation by the 1850s, and the Bixby family later hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to lay out gardens that still shade the property, including several Moreton Bay fig trees designated as horticultural landmarks. Free docent tours run through the house, gardens and barnyard Wednesday through Sunday, on a ranch the family donated to the city in 1967.