Ballona Creek (pronunciation: "Bah-yo-nuh"[2] or "Buy-yo-nah"[3]) is an 8.5-mile (13.7 km)[1] channelized stream in southwestern Los Angeles County, California, United States, that was once a "year-round river lined with sycamores and willows".

[5] The Ballona Creek drainage basin carries water from the Santa Monica Mountains on the north, from the Baldwin Hills to the south, and as far as the Harbor Freeway (I-110) to the east.

In 1982, film critic Richard von Busack, a native of Culver City, described the channelized creek as "a cement drainage ditch indistinguishable in size and content from the Love Canal.

[10] From northern source to southern mouth (year built in parentheses):[46] Several of these crossings existed as “small wooden bridges” of unknown age before they were replaced in the 1930s by WPA infrastructure projects.

Since Ballona drains about 126 square miles (330 km2) of surface area and thousands of street gutters, freeway runoffs, and industrial overflows, its highly toxic waters constitute the most serious source of pollution for Santa Monica Bay.

Ballona Creek is listed by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board impaired for fecal coliform, heavy metals, and pesticides.

Fifty bags of litter, including diapers, syringes and a car bumper, were removed from Ballona Creek on Coastal Cleanup Day in 1988.

Mountains of collected dross mark an impromptu home… This place has a sort of decaying beauty, like the moody ruins of a romanticist oil painting.

[72] After completing its two year pilot program in October 2024, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to permanently install the trash interceptor in the creek.

[77] Urban coyotes[78] and a small population of venomous southern Pacific rattlesnakes[79] live alongside the creek; exercise due caution to protect both the wildlife and visiting humans.

[82][83] In 1953, a 350-pound (160 kg) sea lion made it 3.5 miles (5.6 km) upstream before it got bogged down; the lost pinniped was lassoed by rescuers and returned to the Pacific.

[90][91] These indigenous peoples left a large burial ground near the region along the southwest corner of the Ballona Wetlands near the village of Guashna, alternatively spelled Washna.

Around 1820, a mestizo rancher named Augustine Machado claimed a 14,000-acre (57 km2) Mexican land grant that stretched from modern-day Culver City to Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, California.

The camp is situated on an eminence, one hundred yards from which flows a beautiful stream of sparkling water, about the size of main Weaver Creek, lined with a dense grove of sycamores, and in the immediate vicinity of camp is a pretty grove of willows, planted tastefully by an old Spaniard, and which is beginning to form a pleasant retreat for the inhabitants of the neighborhood, and the troops at this point.In 1886, a California state report described Ballona and Centinela creeks: Circa 1890, the renowned Machado ranch stables were located "a few hundred feet across the Ballona bridge on Overland Avenue.

[99] Deadly floods in 1934 led officials to temporarily close “small wooden bridges spanning Ballona Creek” to limit potential danger to civilians.

[59] Much of the above-ground section of the creek was lined with concrete as part of the flood-control project undertaken by the United States Army Corps of Engineers between 1935 and 1939.

[102] A contract was awarded in 1946 to extend the stone jetties an additional 550 feet (170 m) “to deflect ocean currents to prevent beach erosion.”[103] The tributaries were channelized in the 1950s.

The Ballona Creek Bike Path, which extends almost 7 miles (11 km) from National Boulevard in Culver City to Marina Del Rey, is a popular fitness track.

Running along a combination of existing flood control service roadways and purpose-built paths, it is a fully-grade separated trail permitting cyclists to ride the entire length without signals or road crossings.

[109][110][111] In the 1997 movie Volcano, Mike Roark (Tommy Lee Jones) destroys a 20-story apartment building in a controlled demolition in order to divert a flowing river of lava into Ballona Creek and thus into the Pacific Ocean.