By Jackie Luna and Jonathan Allen

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Before one of the most devastating wildfires in California history, the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on the west side of Los Angeles was filled with expensive homes fronted by green, well-kept landscaping and popular boutiques and cafes.

This week, the Palisades Fire has leveled much of it to blackened rubble. To see what was lost, a Reuters video journalist visited the neighborhood on Friday to retrace the path taken by a couple of YouTube travel influencers who made a video last year of a walking tour, reproduced with their permission.

In May 2024, when the original video was recorded under the blue skies of California, a white building with ionic columns on Sunset Boulevard in the Palisades Village shopping complex was home to a Starbucks (NASDAQ 🙂 and Cafe Vida. It was now consumed, darkened by soot, the palm trees outside rotted, the sky darkened and yellowed.

In the surrounding residential streets, house after house collapsed into charred piles filled with scattered fire-resistant terracotta roof tiles. Still-standing concrete doors open into the ruins.

The Palisades Fire has grown to more than 20,000 hectares since it erupted on Tuesday and was still only 11% contained as of Saturday, and the Palisades neighborhood remains a mandatory evacuation zone. Other fires, some nearly as large, have ravaged other parts of Los Angeles and nearby cities, killing at least 11 people so far and destroying thousands of buildings.

The Palisades were almost empty on Friday: a few Los Angeles firefighters here and there, and a few crows kept watch from a street before dispersing. Outside a house, a former wheelchair sits on the sidewalk, everything melted or burned except for its steel frame.

A scenic view point from Point of Bluffs encompasses the ocean and the curving Pacific Coast Highway. From there, the rest of the Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Estates fills the view: dozens of relatively affordable mobile homes that tumbled toward the beach are now rows of ruins.