Beverly Hills was wealthy and famous long before it was discovered by the movie industry. At the beginning, our fabled El Dorado was blessed with a commodity more precious in Southern California than jewels: water.

Native American inhabitants, the Tongva or Gabrielinos, considered it a sacred site, naming it the Gathering of the Waters or, in Spanish, El Rodeo de las Aguas.

In 1900, Burton Green, along with several partners, purchased "Morocco" for the Amalgamated Oil Company and commissioned a new round of oil exploration. After drilling many unproductive wells, they reorganized as the Rodeo Land and Water Company in 1906. Green and his wife renamed the land Beverly Hills after Beverly Farms, Massachusetts.

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford led the wave of movie stars here when they built their mansion, Pickfair, in 1919. The City's iconic image was enhanced with the spread of television shows and movies set in Beverly Hills, among them The Jack Benny Show, The Beverly Hillbillies and, more recently, Beverly Hills Cop and Beverly Hills 90210.

Today, such excessive development has stopped and the population is around 34,000 and growing slowly. But the mystique of Beverly Hills as a place of wealth and beauty continues to grow as it has since the days of the Tongva -- who taught residents to appreciate of the abundance of the present while preserving what remains of the past with reverence.