Las Vegas
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What is Las Vegas?
Las Vegas is the most populous city in Nevada and serves as the state's economic center. Known as "Vegas," it transformed from a small desert railroad stop in the early 20th century to one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the U.S. This transformation was made possible through entrepreneurship, water access, transportation, and permissive state laws.
Today, Las Vegas is famous for its casinos, hotels, entertainment, and architecture. Though it once lacked traditional cultural institutions, its casinos and hotels became cultural landmarks, drawing visitors worldwide. Las Vegas also offers outdoor recreation at Red Rock Canyon, Lake Mead, and state parks.
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Where is Las Vegas located?
Las Vegas is in southeastern Nevada and serves as the seat for Clark County. It is the largest city and economic center for Nevada. The city is in a broad, arid valley at about 2,000 feet (610 meters) in elevation. The valley is east of the Spring Mountains, whose highest point is Charleston Peak, rising to above 11,910 feet (3,630 meters). Las Vegas is in the Mojave Desert, roughly 100 miles (160 km) east of Death Valley.
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Why is Las Vegas famous?
Las Vegas is famous as an entertainment center with vast casinos, elaborate hotels, and spectacular entertainment venues, drawing visitors worldwide. This transformation occurred due to shrewd entrepreneurship, access to water, an extensive transportation network, and permissive state laws. The city's cultural life is centered on its casinos and hotels.
The prospect of profits from legalized gambling attracted organized crime syndicates, resulting in the construction of the Flamingo and other casinos. Although the Nevada Gaming Commission curtailed the gangsters' freedom, the city continued to grow, thanks to popular entertainers. Today, Las Vegas is known for its nightlife, fine dining, and family-friendly resorts.
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What kinds of entertainment can people find in Las Vegas?
Las Vegas offers diverse entertainment, centered around its casinos and hotels. These venues feature architectural marvels open to the public, with attractions like replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Canyon.
Beyond casinos, Las Vegas boasts a vibrant nightlife, fine dining, and traditional cultural institutions like the Las Vegas Art Museum. Outdoor recreation is also readily available at Red Rock Canyon and Lake Mead. Spectator events range from golf tournaments and auto races to air shows and the World Series of Poker. Las Vegas is also home to major professional sports franchises, including the Vegas Golden Knights and the Las Vegas Raiders.
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How did Las Vegas grow from a small town to a big city?
Las Vegas's transformation began with Paleo-Indian settlements about 12,000 years ago. Antonio Armijo, a Spanish trader, named the area Las Vegas in 1829. A small population of 30 residents in 1900 grew thanks to the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, which provided water and power, and attracted dam builders and those seeking Nevada's relaxed divorce laws.
The introduction of legalized gambling attracted organized crime, with Bugsy Siegel constructing the Flamingo casino in 1945. The Nevada Gaming Commission curtailed the gangsters' freedom, and corporations took their place. The population boomed, exceeding a quarter million by 1990 and continuing to grow rapidly into the 21st century.
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How does tourism affect the economy and culture of Las Vegas?
Las Vegas's economy is highly dependent on tourism and its related activities, which contribute more income than mining, agriculture, and manufacturing combined. The city's cultural life is centered on its casinos and hotels, which have evolved into elaborate complexes that function as resorts for families.
The influx of tourists has helped Las Vegas become one of the wealthiest cities in the United States. This growth has also brought problems such as increased crime, alcohol consumption, and pollution.
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News •
Las Vegas, city, seat (1909) of Clark county, southeastern Nevada, U.S. The only major city in the American West to have been founded in the 20th century, Las Vegas grew from a tiny, desert-bound railroad service center at the outset of the 20th century to the country’s fastest-growing metropolis at century’s end. This transformation—made possible by a combination of shrewd entrepreneurship, access to water, an extensive transportation network, and permissive state laws—has created the city now often known simply as “Vegas,” a place of vast casinos, elaborate hotels, and spectacular entertainment venues that attracts masses of visitors from throughout the world.
Las Vegas is Nevada’s economic centre and largest city. Its metropolitan area, with more than twice the number of people outside the city limits as within them, contains roughly three-fourths of the state’s population. Area 83 square miles (215 square km). Pop. (2010) 583,756; Las Vegas–Paradise Metro Area, 1,951,269; (2020) 641,903; Las Vegas–Henderson Metro Area, 2,265,461.
Character of the city
Las Vegas is a place of million-lightbulb signs and fantastic architecture, of readily visible wealth and carefully hidden poverty. It is a place of superlatives, both positive and negative. Within the city stand the largest glass pyramid in the world; one of the largest hotels in the country, with more than 5,000 rooms; and one of the most expensive hotels ever constructed, the Bellagio. The area along Las Vegas Boulevard and its adjoining near-downtown streets—the famous “Strip”—is the “City Without Clocks,” whose multibillion-dollar economy is devoted to servicing a wide array of impulses and addictions of many kinds. It is this Las Vegas, the flashy playground unofficially known as “Sin City,” that the American novelist and essayist Joan Didion once termed
the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
Downtown Las Vegas is built to serve not residents but guests—tens of millions annually. Once derided as a cultural backwater, Las Vegas has evolved into an economic power that outstrips the output of whole countries. It is one of the country’s leading vacation destinations, drawing far more tourists than the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone National Park.
Beyond the bright lights of the Strip, however, lies a perfectly ordinary Western city, with neighborhoods, churches, shopping centers, and strip malls. It is that city, and not the hotels and casinos, that draws thousands of new residents each year. This growth, coupled with its unusual economic basis, has made Las Vegas one of the wealthiest cities in the country, but it has also brought problems to the area. Las Vegas is among the country’s leaders in personal and property crimes, as well as suicide rates, alcohol consumption, and illegal drug use. The city also suffers the modern urban ills of air and water pollution, and the roads are choked with increasingly heavy traffic as new suburbs spring up in all directions.
Landscape
City site
Las Vegas’s historic core lies at a site once occupied by marshes, freshwater springs, and grassy meadows (hence the city’s name; vegas is Spanish for “meadows”), long since covered by streets, buildings, and parking lots. The modern-day city sprawls across a broad, arid valley at an elevation of roughly 2,000 feet (610 meters). The valley fans out eastward from the picturesque, pine-clad Spring Mountains, whose highest point, Charleston Peak, rises above 11,910 feet (3,630 meters). To the north lie three lower ranges, the Pintwater, Spotted, and Desert mountains, and to the east are the McCullough and Sheep ranges. A wide pass between those two ranges leads to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, the huge reservoir on the Colorado River impounded by the dam; Las Vegas Wash, the valley’s major drainage, leads through this route.
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Surrounded by mountains, the Las Vegas Valley is a basin that collects the scant rainwater and snowmelt that reach it. Underlying that basin is a series of aquifers that once led out into small springs near the site of what is now the downtown area. These springs, most of which have dried up because of excessive groundwater pumping, historically flowed into the Colorado River toward the Pacific Ocean. The southern limit of the Great Basin reaches to just 15 miles (24 km) north of Las Vegas; its waters, which have no outlet to the sea, disappear into a vast inland desert.
The Las Vegas Valley is ecologically part of the Mojave Desert, whose characteristic plant is the Joshua tree. The smallest of the North American deserts, the Mojave supports significant human settlement only in the Las Vegas area and at a few points along the Colorado River. More than four-fifths of the city’s water supply comes from the Colorado River at Lake Mead. The remainder is pumped from underground aquifers. As more water has been removed from these aquifers, the sandy soils have subsided, leading to fissuring and structural damage of the surface and the formation of large sinkholes. These fissures are compounded by the damage caused by occasional earthquakes; the Las Vegas Valley, particularly its northwest quadrant, lies in an active fault zone.