As upward of a million and a half tourists every year descend upon a town of just sixty thousand inhabitants, Santa Fe has inevitably grown somewhat overblown; long-term residents bemoan what’s been lost, while first-time visitors are inclined to wonder what all the fuss is about.

The urban sprawl as you approach from the interstate makes for a lousy introduction, while the rigorous insistence that every downtown building should look like a seventeenth-century Spanish colonial palace takes a bit of getting used to. This is the only city in the world where what at first glance appears to be a perfectly preserved ancient adobe turns out to be a high-rise parking lot, and it would be illegal to build a gas station that didn’t resemble an Indian prayer chamber.

There’s still a lot to like about Santa Fe, however, with its compact, peaceful downtown and walkable streets. Though Santa Fe style may have become something of a cliché, that cliché is changing; the pastel-painted, wooden coyotes that were the obligatory souvenir ten years ago have, for example, been replaced by cast-iron sculptures of Kokopelli, the hunch-backed Ancestral Puebloan flute-player. In a town where the Yellow Pages list over 250 art galleries, you’ll get plenty of opportunities to buy one.

The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELES sprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world.

LA is a young city; in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a community of white American immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than fifty thousand. Only on completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s did it really begin to grow, as a national mecca for good health, clean living, plentiful sunshine and endless acres of citrus crops. The biggest group of transplants were refugees from the Midwest, who created a new political ruling class to replace the old Mexican elite. The old ranchos were soon subdivided, the population grew rapidly, and the enduring symbol of the city became the family-sized suburban house (with swimming pool and two-car garage). The biggest boom came after World War II with the mushrooming of the aeronautics industry – which, until post-Cold War military cutbacks, accounted for one in four jobs.

The first-time visitor may well find Los Angeles thrilling and threatening in equal proportions; it’s a place that picks you up and sweeps you along whether you want it to or not. While it has its fine-art museums, California cuisine and a few old-fashioned urban plazas, what people really come here for is to experience the city that has come to epitomize the American Dream – the fantasy worlds of Disneyland and Hollywood, as well as the gilded opulence of Beverly Hills and Malibu.

SAN FRANCISCO proper occupies just 48 hilly square miles at the end of a slender peninsula, almost perfectly centered along the California coast. Arguably the most beautiful, certainly the most liberal city in the United States, remains true to himself: a funky, individualistic, surprisingly small city of cultured proud to be partners of their cousins in LA – the last bastion of civilization in the American suburbs crazy.

It’s a compact and approachable place, where the streets of downtown rising on impossible gradients to reveal stunning views of the city, bay and its surroundings, and the fog suddenly rolled in a fog enveloped the city. This is not the California of mono-tonous blue sky and lazy warm – the temperature rarely exceeds the seventies, and even during summer can drop much lower.

The natives of this area, Ohlone Indians, all but eliminated in recent years in the year 1776 the founding of the Mission Dolores, the sixth in a chain of Spanish Catholic missions that ran throughout California. Two years after the Americans replaced the Mexicans in the year 1846, the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra accelerate skylark Gold Rush. Within one year fifty thousand pioneers had traveled west, and east of China, turning San Francisco from a muddy village and the desert hills to the center of a growing supply and transit town. At the transcontinental railroad completed in 1869, San Francisco was a lawless, rowdy Boomtown of bordellos and drinking dens, something the moneyed elite – who hit it big on the silver far more reliable Comstock Load – worked hard to improve, build wide streets, parks, a cable car system and elaborate Victorian redwood mansion.

In the midst of a golden age, however, earthquake, followed by three days of fire, wiped out most of the city in 1906. Rebuilding began immediately, so that in a city more beautiful than before; in subsequent decades, writers like Dashiell Hammett and Jack London lived and worked here. Many of London, including Coit Tower and the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, built in the 1920s and 1930s. By World War II in San Francisco has been beaten by Los Angeles as a major west coast city, but the pursuit of excellence with the emergence of a new culture in the Fifties Beats and the hippies in the Sixties, when the fusion of music, protest, rebellion and, of course, drugs that characterized 1967’s “Summer of Love” took over the Haight-Ashbury district.

In a conservative America, San Francisco’s reputation as a liberal oasis continues to grow, attract waves of migrants from all over the United States. It is estimated that more than half the urban population is from somewhere else. This is a city in a constant state of evolution, fast gentrifying itself into one of the most high-end cities in the world – thanks, in part, to a disposable incomes pumped into the coffers of big singles and gay contingents. Gay capital of the world, San Francisco also became the place of the dot.com revolution rose and fell. The wealth generated at one time made housing prices skyrocket – often at the expense of middle and lower classes – but the closure of hundreds of start-up IT companies has brought real estate prices go back to (almost) reasonable levels. Despite the current economic city ebb and flow, your impression of the city likely will not be changed – it remains one of the most proudly distinct places to be found anywhere.

The most beguiling city in the world, New York is an adrenaline-charged, history-laden place that holds immense romantic appeal for visitors. Wandering the streets here, you’ll cut between buildings that are icons to the modern age – and whether gazing at the flickering lights of the midtown skyscrapers as you speed across the Queensboro bridge, experiencing the 4am half-life downtown, or just wasting the morning on the Staten Island ferry, you really would have to be made of stone not to be moved by it all. There’s no place quite like it.

While the events of September 11, 2001, which demolished the World Trade Center, shook New York to its core, the populace responded resiliently under the composed aegis of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Until the attacks, many New Yorkers loved to hate Giuliani, partly because they saw him as committed to making their city too much like everyone else’s. To some extent he succeeded, and during the late Nineties New York seemed cleaner, safer, and more liveable, as the city took on a truly international allure and shook off the more notorious aspects to its reputation. However, the maverick quality of New York and its people still shines as brightly as it ever did. Even in the aftermath of the World Trade Center’s collapse, New York remains a unique and fascinating city – and one you’ll want to return to again and again.

You could spend weeks in New York and still barely scratch the surface, but there are some key attractions – and some pleasures – that you won’t want to miss. There are the different ethnic neighborhoods, like lower Manhattan’s Chinatown and the traditionally Jewish Lower East Side (not so much anymore); and the more artsy concentrations of SoHo, TriBeCa, and the East and West Villages. Of course, there is the celebrated architecture of corporate Manhattan, with the skyscrapers in downtown and midtown forming the most indelible images. There are the museums, not just the Metropolitan and MoMA, but countless other smaller collections that afford weeks of happy wandering. In between sights, you can eat just about anything, at any time, cooked in any style; you can drink in any kind of company; and sit through any number of obscure movies. The more established arts – dance, theater, music – are superbly catered for; and New York’s clubs are as varied and exciting as you might expect. And for the avid consumer, the choice of shops is vast, almost numbingly exhaustive in this heartland of the great capitalist dream.