Torrance is a city in the Los Angeles metropolitan area located in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The city is part of what is known as the South Bay region of the metropolitan area. Torrance has 1.5 miles (2.4 km) of beachfront on the Pacific Ocean and a moderate year-round climate with an average rainfall of 12 inches (300 mm) per year. Torrance was incorporated in 1921, and at the 2020 census had a population of 147,067 residents. The city has 30 parks. The city consistently ranks among the safest cities in Los Angeles County. Torrance is the birthplace of the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO).

For thousands of years, the area where Torrance is located was part of the Tongva Native American homeland.

In 1784, the Spanish Crown deeded Rancho San Pedro (including today's Torrance), a tract of over 75,000 acres (300 km2) in the Province of Las Californias of New Spain, to soldier Juan José Domínguez. It was later divided in 1846, with Governor Pío Pico granting Rancho de los Palos Verdes to José Loreto and Juan Capistrano Sepulveda in the Alta California territory of independent Mexico.

In the early 1900s, real estate developer Jared Sidney Torrance and other investors saw the value of creating a mixed industrial-residential community south of Los Angeles. They purchased part of an old Spanish land grant and hired landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to design a planned community. The resulting town was founded in October 1912 and named after Mr. Torrance. The city of Torrance was formally incorporated in May 1921, the townsite initially being bounded by Western Avenue on the east, Del Amo Boulevard on the north, Crenshaw Boulevard on the west, and on the south by Plaza Del Amo east of where it meets Carson Street, and by Carson Street west of where it meets Plaza Del Amo.

The first residential avenue created in Torrance was Gramercy and the second avenue was Andreo. Many of the houses on these avenues turned 100 years of age in 2012. Both avenues are located in the area referred to as Old Town Torrance. This section of Torrance is under review to be classified as a historical district. Some of the early civic and residential buildings were designed by the renowned and innovative Southern California architect Irving Gill, in his distinctive combining of Mission Revival and early Modernist architecture.

One of the nation's largest shopping centers grew in Torrance - Del Amo Fashion Center, and during the 1970s the Old Towne Mall combined themed amusement and nostalgia with shopping.