Las Vegas: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

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Almost nothing on the Strip is inside the city of Las Vegas, and that is not an accident of surveying. On the eighth of December 1950 the casino owners had the county create an unincorporated township called Paradise, specifically so that the city could never annex them, tax them or license them. Every resort on this walk is in that township. The practical warning is about scale: these buildings are three hundred metres long each, so what looks like a five-minute walk on a map is twenty-five minutes, mostly indoors, and there is no shade outside. Walk this after four in the afternoon.

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A short history of Las Vegas

The desert valley had springs, hence the Spanish name, "the meadows". In 1855 Mormons built a small fort here but left after two years. The city itself was founded on 15 May 1905, at an auction of plots beside a railway line. In 1931 Nevada legalised gambling, and in the same year construction began on the nearby Hoover Dam, which brought thousands of workers to the city. In the 1940s and 1950s the first large casinos were built along the Strip. In the 1950s nuclear tests were carried out in the desert about 100 kilometres from the city, and tourists watched the mushroom clouds from the hotels.

The ten best sights in Las Vegas

1
The Mob Museum
In the 1933 federal courthouse where one of the Kefauver hearings was actually held in 1950
2
Neon Museum
About 250 retired signs in a yard; book the night tour, because half of them are lit
3
Atomic Museum
The hundred above-ground nuclear tests north of here, and how the city sold tickets to watch them
4
Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort
1855, and the oldest building of any kind in Nevada; the Mormons abandoned it within two years
5
Springs Preserve
The artesian springs that gave the city its name and its water; they ran dry in 1962
6
Nevada State Museum
Inside the Springs Preserve; ichthyosaur fossils, Southern Paiute baskets and the atomic years
7
Golden Gate Hotel
Opened in 1906 and the oldest hotel and casino in Las Vegas; it had the city’s first telephone
8
The Moulin Rouge site
The first racially integrated casino in Las Vegas, 1955; it closed in about six months
9
Jackson Avenue, Westside
The Black business and music district; the Strip was segregated until an agreement signed in 1960
10
Smith Center for the Performing Arts
2012, in Art Deco built new; the carillon in the tower has forty-seven bells and plays on the hour

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The Strip is not in Las Vegas

The Welcome Sign · Designed in 1959 by Betty Willis, who also made the Moulin Rouge sign, and she never copyrighted it — she said deliberately that it was her gift to the city, which is why it appears on everything from T-shirts to tattoos with no licence fee. It is six kilometres south of Bellagio, in Paradise township rather than Las Vegas, and the diamond shape and the silver dollars on it were a deliberate reference to the mining state.
Mandalay Bay and Luxor · The Luxor pyramid has a light at its apex that is the strongest beam in the world, and it attracts so many insects that a colony of bats hunts in it every night; the moths and the bats are an entirely accidental ecosystem built by a hotel. The pyramid’s lifts travel at an angle of thirty-nine degrees because a vertical shaft is impossible inside that shape.
New York-New York and the Sphere · The Sphere opened in 2023 and it is the largest spherical building on earth: a hundred and twelve metres tall, with an outside skin of about fifty-four thousand square metres of LED that can show anything, and an inside screen with a resolution of sixteen thousand by sixteen thousand. The outside is free to look at and that is how most people see it. It cost over two billion dollars.
The Fountains of Bellagio · The fountains run every fifteen minutes and use about forty-five million litres of water, and the obvious objection — a city in the Mojave with a lake out front — has a specific answer: the lake is filled from a private well on the site that predates the water authority and has its own rights, not from the municipal supply. Las Vegas recycles almost all its indoor water back to Lake Mead, so the real restriction in this city is on lawns, not fountains.
The Bellagio Conservatory · Free, and worth going in for one reason: it is rebuilt from nothing five times a year, and each changeover takes about a week with a crew of over a hundred working through the night. Nothing is reused between seasons. The flowers are mostly real and are replaced continuously, because the dry air kills them in days.
Caesars Palace and the Forum · Caesars opened in 1966 and the name has no apostrophe on purpose — the founder said every guest was a Caesar, so it is not one Caesar’s palace. The Forum Shops ceiling, painted in 1992, cycles from dawn to dusk every two hours, and the Roman statues at the fountain move and speak on a timer, which was state of the art animatronics when it opened and is now unmistakably of its decade.

Downtown, the Westside and 1960

Las Vegas was founded on the fifteenth of May 1905, when a railroad auctioned twelve hundred lots in one day beside a water stop. It was a railway town with artesian springs, which is what Las Vegas means — the meadows. The part of the story the Strip does not tell is that the Strip was racially segregated until 1960: Black performers headlined the showrooms and were not allowed to sleep in the hotels, eat in them or use the pools, and Black residents lived on the Westside with unpaved streets. This route is both halves. Go in the morning.

Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort · A Mormon mission of thirty men built an adobe fort here in 1855 beside the springs, to grow food and mine lead on the route between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. The lead turned out to be mostly silver, which they did not want, and the mission was abandoned within two years. One adobe building survives and it is the oldest structure of any kind in the state of Nevada.
Golden Gate Hotel · Opened in 1906, a year after the land auction, and it is the oldest hotel and casino in Las Vegas and the oldest continuously operating one in Nevada. It had the city’s first telephone — the number was one. It also claims to have introduced the shrimp cocktail to Las Vegas in 1959 at fifty cents, which is a small claim and is written on the wall.
The Mob Museum · The building is the 1933 federal courthouse, and one of the Kefauver Committee hearings on organised crime was actually held in the courtroom upstairs in November 1950 — the museum has restored that room and you sit in it. The hearings were televised nationally and were the first time most Americans heard the word Mafia used in public by officials.
Fremont Street · This was the whole of Las Vegas until the 1950s, and the first paved street in the city; the canopy over five blocks of it was built in 1995 to stop downtown dying, and it now carries forty-nine million LEDs. The Golden Nugget, Binion’s and the Golden Gate are all original frontages under it, and the pavement is where the city licenses street performers, which is why it is the way it is.
The Moulin Rouge site · Opened in May 1955 as the first racially integrated casino in Las Vegas, with a half-Black and half-white staff, and it was an immediate success — the Strip performers came here after their own shows because they could not drink in the hotels they had just played. It closed in about six months, for reasons never fully established. In March 1960 civil rights leaders and the governor met in this building and signed the agreement that desegregated the Strip.
Jackson Avenue, Westside · Through the 1940s and 1950s this was the Black commercial and music district: the Brown Derby, the Cotton Club, the El Rio. Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole played the Strip and slept here. The neighbourhood was never served with paved streets or sewers at the same rate as the rest of the city, and a 1950s ordinance had confined Black residents to it. Almost all of the clubs are gone and the markers are on the pavement.

The dam, the bomb and the water

Las Vegas has about a hundred and ten millimetres of rain a year and no river, and three federal projects made it possible: a dam that gave it electricity and water, a weapons test site that gave it a payroll, and a highway. Gambling was re-legalised in Nevada in March 1931, the same year the dam construction started and brought five thousand men to a town of five thousand people. The order of those events is the whole explanation of the city. Start early; the dam car park fills by ten.

Boulder City · The federal government built this town in 1931 for the dam workers and ran it directly as a reservation until 1960 — no gambling, no alcohol, and a government manager instead of a mayor. When it finally incorporated as a city, the residents wrote the gambling ban into their own charter, and it is still there. Boulder City is one of only two places in the state of Nevada where casino gambling is illegal.
Hoover Dam · Built between 1931 and 1936 and finished two years early. The engineering problem was heat: a monolithic concrete pour of that size would have taken about a hundred and twenty-five years to cool and would have cracked itself apart, so it was poured as interlocking blocks with nearly six hundred and sixty kilometres of steel pipe cast inside them, through which refrigerated water was circulated. Ninety-six men died in the construction by the official count.
Lake Mead · The reservoir behind the dam, and the single most important thing to look at is the white band on the rock walls — that is mineral deposit left where the water used to be, and it is now over forty metres high. The lake supplies about ninety per cent of Las Vegas’s water. When the level fell far enough in 2022 the city’s lowest intake was exposed and a third intake tunnel, drilled under the lake bed, took over.
The Atomic Museum · Between January 1951 and 1962 about a hundred above-ground nuclear devices were detonated a hundred and twenty-five kilometres north-west of here, and the mushroom clouds were visible from downtown. The city did not hide from it — after the first televised test in April 1952 the Chamber of Commerce published calendars of detonation times with the best viewing spots, hotels held dawn bomb parties on their roofs, bars served atomic cocktails and a Miss Atomic Blast was crowned.
Springs Preserve · The city is named after the artesian springs that used to flow here — las vegas means the meadows — and they were what made this a stop on the Spanish trail and then a railway water stop. Pumping for the growing city dropped the water table until the springs stopped flowing entirely in 1962. The preserve is built on the site, and the exhibits are honest about the fact that the thing the city is named for was consumed by the city.
Wetlands Park · This is where Las Vegas’s treated wastewater flows back to Lake Mead, and the arrangement is the key to the whole water question: because every litre returned is credited against the city’s allocation, indoor water use here is effectively free of cost to the supply. That is why the restriction in this valley is on grass — Nevada banned non-functional turf in the Las Vegas valley in 2021, the first law of its kind in the United States.

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Getting to Las Vegas and getting around

Harry Reid International Airport · Three kilometres from the Strip — you can see the runway from the hotels; there are slot machines at the gates
The Deuce, Las Vegas Boulevard · A double-decker bus the length of the Strip, twenty-four hours; a day pass costs about eight dollars
Las Vegas Monorail · Private and paid, on the east side only; it does not reach the airport and it misses half the Strip
Downtown and Fremont · Six kilometres north of the Strip; this is the actual city of Las Vegas, which the Strip is not
Boulder City · Thirty-four kilometres south-east, built for the dam workers; gambling is illegal there to this day
Las Vegas Welcome Sign · Six kilometres south of Bellagio with its own free car park; it is not in the city of Las Vegas either

Cheap eats in Las Vegas

There are two Las Vegas food economies and they barely touch. On the Strip, celebrity-chef restaurants sell at New York prices to people on holiday, and the buffet — which the city invented in 1946 to keep gamblers from leaving the floor — mostly died in 2020 and only partly came back. Three kilometres west, on Spring Mountain Road, is one of the best Asian food corridors in the United States: six kilometres of Thai, Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese restaurants in ordinary strip malls, open until three in the morning because this is a city where a third of the workforce finishes at two. Ten to thirty dollars, cards everywhere.

Spring Mountain Road · Six kilometres of Asian restaurants in strip malls; most are open past two in the morning
Lotus of Siam · Northern Thai in a strip mall that has won national awards; book a month ahead for dinner
Tacos El Gordo · Tijuana-style adobada off a vertical spit, on the Strip, open till four; three dollars a taco
Golden Steer Steakhouse · Open since 1958 with the original red booths; the one Sinatra used is numbered and can be requested
The Peppermill · A 1972 coffee shop open twenty-four hours, with the original neon, mirrors and a fire pit in water
The buffet · Invented here in 1946 to stop gamblers leaving the floor to eat; most closed in 2020 and few returned
Esther’s Kitchen, Arts District · The restaurant that made the Arts District a dining area rather than a gallery row; book ahead
Container Park food · Downtown, in shipping containers, and cheaper than anything on the Strip by half
Fremont East · Three blocks of small bars and kitchens where the people who work the Strip drink after two

Museums in Las Vegas

Las Vegas has four museums that are genuinely about something and they are all in the actual city rather than on the Strip: the mob, the bomb, the neon and the springs. Between them they cover every force that built this place — organised crime money, federal weapons spending, the sign industry that invented the city’s visual language, and the water that ran out. None is expensive and the Neon Museum night tour is the one to book first.

Neon Museum · About 250 signs in a yard; the night tour is the one, because part of the collection is relit
The Mob Museum · In the 1933 federal courthouse; the restored courtroom hosted a real Kefauver hearing in 1950
Atomic Museum · A Smithsonian affiliate; about a hundred above-ground tests, and the city sold tickets to watch
Springs Preserve · Built on the springs the city is named for, which stopped flowing in 1962 from over-pumping
Nevada State Museum · Inside the Springs Preserve on one ticket; ichthyosaurs, Paiute baskets and the atomic decade
Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort · 1855, the oldest building in Nevada, and a thirty-man mission abandoned it within two years
Clark County Museum · A street of real houses from 1900 to 1960 moved here and furnished; cheap and almost empty
Smith Center · Built 2012 in genuine Art Deco, with limestone from the same quarry as the Hoover Dam intake towers

Holy places in Las Vegas

The religious history here is short and the civic history carries the weight instead, so this is where the city’s harder ground sits: a Mormon mission that failed, an integrated casino that lasted six months, a Black district that the city did not pave, a weapons site on Southern Paiute land, and a wedding industry built on the fact that Nevada requires no waiting period and no blood test. About eighty thousand marriages a year are performed in Clark County, which is one of the highest figures anywhere on earth.

The Moulin Rouge site · Opened May 1955 as the first integrated casino here; the 1960 agreement to desegregate was signed inside it
Jackson Avenue, Westside · The Black district; it had no paved streets or sewers while the Strip was being built two miles away
Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort · A mission sent in 1855 to convert the Southern Paiute and grow food; it gave up in two years
Nevada National Security Site · The test site sits on land the Southern Paiute and Western Shoshone never ceded by treaty
Boulder City · Built by the federal government in 1931 and dry and gambling-free by design; it still is
Hoover Dam · Ninety-six men died in the official count; the first was a surveyor and the last was his son, fourteen years apart
Seven Magic Mountains · Ugo Rondinone, 2016, in the desert thirty-two kilometres south; it was licensed for two years
Las Vegas wedding chapels · Nevada requires no waiting period and no blood test, and that one legal fact built the whole industry

Nature and day trips near Las Vegas

The thing nobody expects about Las Vegas is how good the landscape around it is. The city sits in the Mojave at about six hundred metres, and within an hour’s drive there is a sandstone canyon with a thrust fault you can see from the road, a state park full of petroglyphs, a three-thousand-six-hundred-metre mountain with a ski area on it, and a reservoir with a forty-metre bathtub ring. The rules are simple and serious: in summer the valley hits forty-five degrees, hikers die here every year, and the only honest advice is to be off the trail by nine in the morning.

Red Rock Canyon · A one-way 21-kilometre scenic loop; a timed entry reservation is required October to May
Valley of Fire State Park · Nevada’s first state park, 1935; petroglyphs on Atlatl Rock and the Fire Wave trail
Mount Charleston · 3,633 metres and forty-two kilometres away; about fifteen degrees cooler than the valley floor
Lake Mead · The white band on the rock is over forty metres of dropped water level; swimming is allowed
Spring Mountain Ranch · A working ranch under the Red Rock cliffs, owned at one point by Howard Hughes; cheap and shaded
Wetlands Park · Nine kilometres of trail where the city’s water returns to the lake; genuine bird habitat
Sloan Canyon · Over three hundred rock art panels with about seventeen hundred images; twenty-seven kilometres south
Floyd Lamb Park · Ponds, peacocks and the site where mammoth and Pleistocene camel fossils were excavated

Things to do in Las Vegas with kids

Las Vegas with children is better than its reputation but it needs one rule followed absolutely: nobody under twenty-one may stop or linger on a casino floor, and since the floor is the route between almost everything in a resort, a family route has to go along the Strip outside or through the shopping levels. The other rule is heat. From June to September the pavement is genuinely dangerous for small children in the afternoon, and the free indoor things — the conservatory, the aquariums, the shops with the painted sky — are what the day is built around.

Bellagio Conservatory and fountains · Both free; the fountains run every fifteen minutes after eight and every half hour in the afternoon
Discovery Children’s Museum · Nine floors in Symphony Park downtown, built around a climbing tower; booked slots in holidays
Springs Preserve · Trails, a butterfly habitat and a flash flood simulation that children remember for years
STRAT Tower rides · Three thrill rides on the roof at 270 metres; height and weight limits are strict and published
Lion Habitat Ranch · In Henderson; a sanctuary for the lions that used to live inside a casino until 2012
High Roller · Thirty minutes a revolution in an enclosed cabin; the daytime fare is much cheaper than at night
Container Park · A free play structure in the middle of it, and under twenty-ones are allowed in until nine
Red Rock Canyon · Several walks under half an hour, including Lost Creek with a seasonal waterfall; go at opening

Nightlife in Las Vegas

Las Vegas is the only major American city with no closing time at all — bars and casinos may legally serve twenty-four hours, and most do. The economic structure is worth knowing before you spend: the big Strip nightclubs run on bottle service and table minimums that start in the hundreds, the queue you see is partly managed to look long, and women often enter free while men pay. What is cheap and genuinely good is downtown: Fremont East and the Arts District have small bars with no cover, and the people in them work on the Strip.

Fremont East · Three blocks of small bars with no cover charge; this is where Strip staff drink after two
The Arts District · Breweries and cocktail rooms in old warehouses; the first Friday of the month fills the street
The Sphere · The outside screen is free to watch from the pavement and the shows change through the night
The Peppermill Fireside Lounge · A 1972 lounge with a fire pit set in a pool of water; open all night and entirely unchanged
Golden Nugget, Fremont · The downtown casino with a shark tank the pool slide goes through; the floor has lower minimums
The Strip after midnight · Open containers are legal on the Strip but only in plastic or aluminium, never glass; that is enforced

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Frequently asked questions about Las Vegas

What is there to see in Las Vegas?

The top sights in Las Vegas are The Mob Museum, Neon Museum and Atomic Museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Las Vegas?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Las Vegas without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Las Vegas?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Las Vegas, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The Strip is not in Las Vegas.

How do you get to Las Vegas and get around?

The main ways are Harry Reid International Airport, The Deuce, Las Vegas Boulevard and Las Vegas Monorail. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Las Vegas, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Las Vegas that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

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