After Pacific Palisades and Malibu, it's Hollywood's turn. Los Angeles is surrounded by fire. The film capital's legendary landmarks are engulfed in flames that firefighters can no longer control. By the morning of Thursday, January 9, the four or five fires in progress in the county – counting has become difficult – had claimed five lives, caused the evacuation of more than 130,000 people and destroying more than 1,900 buildings, some of them part of the city's iconic heritage. A sense of the end of an era gripped the city, which was partly covered by a huge black cloud. Los Angeles will never be the same again.

The first fire broke out at around 10 am on Tuesday, in Pacific Palisades, an upscale neighborhood that slopes down to the ocean and is home to some 25,000 residents, many of them stars. Images filmed on Wednesday by TV helicopters – which were able to take off, as the violent winds that have been blowing over the region for several days had eased somewhat in intensity – showed devastation comparable to that which had struck Paradise, the northern California locality reduced to rubble by a fire in 2018. Bits of walls, sections of chimneys, smoking rubble.

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