🇺🇸 United States · West and California
Las Vegas is like nowhere else in the world: a city that rose out of nothing in the middle of the desert, made of lights, excess, fantasy and 24-hour entertainment. On the Strip, its famous boulevard, the hotels are not simply hotels but entire worlds: an Egyptian pyramid, an Eiffel Tower, the canals of Venice, the dancing fountains of the Bellagio, castles, volcanoes and skyscrapers, all on a colossal, dazzling scale. It is the world capital of gambling and spectacle, the city that never sleeps, where at night the desert lights up with an ocean of neon.
But Las Vegas is far more than casinos: it is the city of big shows (from Cirque du Soleil to residency concerts by the world's biggest stars), of endless buffets and the fine dining of famous chefs, of luxury pools, nightclubs, free shows out in the street and an atmosphere of fun and partying without equal. And it is, surprisingly, one of the best gateways to some of the most impressive natural wonders in the United States: the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam and a handful of spectacular national parks are within reach.
This guide covers the essentials of Las Vegas with a practical, warm eye: how to enjoy the Strip and its incredible hotels, which shows to pick, what is free and what costs money, how to get around (and why distances deceive), and how to use the city as a base for unforgettable trips into nature. Las Vegas can be overwhelming and excessive, but taken with good humor and some planning, it is a unique experience worth having at least once.
The valley where Las Vegas sits was a natural oasis in the middle of the Mojave Desert: it had springs and green meadows that gave it its Spanish name, 'Las Vegas' ('the meadows'), given by Hispanic explorers at the start of the 19th century, when the area was a leg of the Spanish Camino Real toward California. The region was inhabited by the Paiute. After passing to the United States (mid-19th century) and a brief Mormon settlement, Las Vegas was officially founded as a city in 1905, tied to the railroad. Two events drove its takeoff: in 1931, Nevada legalized gambling, and that same year work began on the nearby Hoover Dam, which brought thousands of workers and, afterward, abundant water and electricity. From the 1930s and 1940s the first casino-hotels were born, and in the 1940s and 1950s the Strip developed, with the legendary (and not entirely factual) involvement of organized crime, which saw the business in gambling. Over time, the casinos passed from mob hands to large corporations, and Las Vegas reinvented itself again and again: from the city of gambling and 'Rat Pack' shows, to the themed megaresorts of the 1990s, to today's global capital of entertainment, shows and conventions. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of silver and desert: Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe land, forged by the silver rush of the Comstock Lode, born in the middle of the Civil War and today famous the world over for Las Vegas, capital of gambling and show business.
Read the history of Nevada →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Surprising as it may seem for a city now famous for its artificiality and its excess, the origin of Las Vegas lies in nature: it was an oasis in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The valley had springs of underground water that surfaced, creating meadows and green areas amid the aridity of the desert. That unexpected vegetation gave it its name: 'Las Vegas', in Spanish, meaning 'the meadows' or 'the vegas' (fertile, moist land, the floodplain of a river).
The name was given by Spanish-speaking explorers and travelers at the start of the 19th century, when the valley served as a resting and watering point on the so-called Spanish Camino Real (the 'Old Spanish Trail'), a caravan route linking New Mexico with California. For travelers crossing the desert, finding those meadows and springs was a vital relief. The region was inhabited by the Southern Paiute, an Indigenous people adapted to life in the desert.
After the war between Mexico and the United States (mid-19th century), the area passed into American hands. There was a brief and failed attempt at settlement by Mormon colonists in the middle of the century, but for decades the Las Vegas valley remained a remote, thinly populated waypoint. Nothing suggested that that oasis in the middle of nowhere would become one of the most famous cities in the world.
Las Vegas as a city was born thanks to the railroad. At the start of the 20th century, the area became a strategic point on the rail line connecting Salt Lake City with southern California, because of its water and its location. On 15 May 1905 the first lots beside the tracks were auctioned, a date considered the city's official founding. In 1911, Las Vegas was incorporated as a municipality. Through its first years it was a small, modest desert railroad town.
Two almost simultaneous events, at the start of the 1930s, laid the foundations of its extraordinary future. The first was the construction of the nearby Hoover Dam (1931-1936) on the Colorado River: a colossal project that, in the middle of the Great Depression, drew thousands of workers to the region, energized the local economy and, above all, gave Las Vegas something decisive: abundant, cheap water and electricity, the resources that would make it possible for a great city to grow in the desert.
The second, and perhaps more decisive for its identity, was that in 1931 the state of Nevada legalized gambling. While gambling was banned in nearly the whole country, Nevada made it a legal activity, and Las Vegas, with its new influx of workers and its permissiveness, began to develop casinos and gaming halls. That legal decision, combined with the dam's water and electricity, was the seed of the future world capital of gambling.
The 1940s and 1950s saw the birth of the Las Vegas we know: the one of the big hotel-casinos and of the Strip. Outside the city limits, along the highway that led to Los Angeles, the first hotel-casino resorts began to be built, combining gambling, lodging, shows and restaurants in one place. That stretch of highway would become the legendary Las Vegas Strip.
One name and one episode mark the mythology of this era: in 1946, the gangster Bugsy Siegel, tied to organized crime, opened the luxurious Flamingo hotel-casino, one of the pioneers of the Strip. Although the story owes a lot to legend and simplification, it is true that organized crime (the mob) played an important role in financing and controlling the casinos of Las Vegas through these decades, drawn by the enormous and lucrative business of legal gambling. Money, real and of dubious origin, flowed into the building of ever bigger, more glamorous casinos.
Those were the golden years of classic Las Vegas: the city filled with neon, with shows, with show business figures. It was the era of the 'Rat Pack' (Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and company), who performed and gathered in the city, embodying the glamour and the fun of the Las Vegas of the 1950s and 1960s. Las Vegas earned its reputation as the capital of gambling, spectacle and the night, with an aura somewhere between glamorous and dangerous.
From the late 1960s and through the 1970s, Las Vegas lived a deep transformation: control of the casinos passed, little by little, from the hands of organized crime to those of large legal corporations. Changes in Nevada's laws allowed publicly traded companies to own casinos, which attracted legitimate investment and professionalized the industry. A key figure was the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who bought several hotels and helped 'clean up' the city's image. Gambling stopped being a gangsters' business and became a corporate industry on an enormous scale.
The great reinvention came in the 1980s and, above all, the 1990s, with the era of the themed megaresorts. Visionaries like Steve Wynn drove the building of colossal, spectacular hotel-casinos, each with a theme that made it an attraction in itself: the pyramid of the Luxor, the Venice of the Venetian, the Paris of the Paris, the volcanoes and pirates, the fountains of the Bellagio. Las Vegas stopped being just a gambling city and became a gigantic amusement park for adults (and, at one point, also aimed at families), a destination of total entertainment.
That reinvention multiplied the city's tourist appeal: to the casinos were added the big shows, fine dining, luxury shopping, the pools, the nightclubs and the conventions. Las Vegas became one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world, capable of constantly reinventing itself to keep drawing millions of visitors.
Today Las Vegas is, without argument, the world capital of entertainment, and a city in perpetual reinvention. Although gambling is still a fundamental part of its identity and its economy, the city has diversified enormously: an ever larger share of its income comes from shows, food, shopping, clubs, conventions and big events, rather than from betting itself. Las Vegas has become a destination for experiences of every kind.
The city draws tens of millions of visitors from all over the world every year. It is home to some of the biggest live shows on the planet —the residencies of the great music stars, the Cirque du Soleil productions—, an epicenter of fine dining (with restaurants by the most famous chefs), a major convention center and, in recent years, a venue for big sporting events and new technological, spectacular attractions. The Strip keeps growing and renewing itself with ever more ambitious hotels and offerings.
Las Vegas also keeps its role as a great tourist base for discovering the natural wonders of the American Southwest: the Grand Canyon, the Hoover Dam and the national parks of the West are within reach, which makes it an ideal starting point for combining entertainment and nature. Without water, without the Hoover Dam and without the legalization of gambling, that desert oasis would never have been what it is: a city that rose out of nothing and became one of the most famous, dazzling and singular in the world.