The self-styled entertainment capital of the world, Las Vegas has featured in dozens of blockbuster movies, usually involving heists, wild weekends, or runaway weddings. With 40 million visitors in a good year, and several of the world’s largest hotels (including two with more than 6,000 rooms), this neon-lit extravaganza is a real eye-popper. It is a place of great performers and performances, of high art and of kitsch, of elegant dining and of stroke-inducing levels of cholesterol. It’s an unreal world where you can celebrate, start afresh, come out of the closet, or just try to forget. A mesmerising playground for sinners and for winners, and for everyone in-between, because “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”, as the old slogan used to say. Where to start? Read on . . .
Main photo: the famous Las Vegas sign, number eight below (Alamy)
1. Strut the Strip
Las Vegas Boulevard, aka the Strip, is the city’s central nervous system. Most of the big hotels, casinos and entertainment centres are plugged into a key couple of miles. Confusingly this is not downtown; what’s called Downtown, the original centre, lies a short taxi ride north. Nevertheless the Las Vegas Strip is where everyone comes to be seduced by the glitz and the glamour of Sin City. At night the pavements here are a parade of showgirls and muscle men, bachelor parties and just-marrieds, plus touts for cocktail bars and strip shows. In other words, an infectious buzz of people with one thing in mind: having a good time. See it on foot, or even from the back of a limo.
2. See free stuff
You have to be prepared to splash the cash in Vegas, but some things along the Strip are free, most notably the 1,214 magnificent fountains outside the Hotel Bellagio, which cavort to music every 15 minutes, and are best seen after dark. In a similar vein, the volcano outside the Mirage erupts as regular as clockwork, on the hour, with four hot minutes of fireballs, geysers and lava streams. And the Eiffel Tower opposite the Bellagio does a good job of out-twinkling the original, with a choreography of coloured lights and strobes every 30 minutes after sunset. Meanwhile, indoors, lots of the big-name hotels have snippets of shows in their lobby areas.
3. Mosey around Downtown
The original centre of Las Vegas, a 15-minute taxi north, is more intimate and less expensive than the Strip. Downtown Las Vegas is where the city began back in 1905, around the railway station. Its main drag is buzzy, pedestrianised Fremont Street, a destination in itself. Also here are lots of typical wedding chapels, where so many get married on impulse, plus a couple of key museums and vintage casinos. Main Station, with its fancy ironwork and stained glass, no longer welcomes trains: it is now — guess what — a casino, plus a craft brewery and a restaurant.
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4. Revel in the Fremont Street experience
Fremont Street is Downtown’s mostly pedestrianised mile-long entertainment hub. Its most remarkable feature is its 450m-long concave roof canopy, which is also the world’s largest video screen, with a light show of hypnotic, sometimes hallucinatory digital imagery. That show is interrupted regularly by fleeting and whooping silhouettes of zipliners enjoying Slotzilla, which runs the length of the canopy. At the weekend Fremont is packed, has live music stages, street food and a variety of street performers.
5. Ogle the gamblers
If you’re unused to casinos then they’re a show in themselves, a microcosm of human behaviour in all its manifestations. Most are dominated by garish ranks of slot machines, jangling and bleeping in their own private language. Regular tales are told of diehard gamblers having heart attacks and yet refusing to leave their machines. And then there are the higher-rolling card and roulette tables, where inscrutable demeanour is de rigueur and glamorous waiting staff keep the big spenders well lubricated. Hang out and watch, for there’s no obligation whatsoever to play, and some casinos (for example Planet Hollywood) even have live music and go-go dancers to keep the punters in the mood.
6. Sample showpiece hotels
Many a Las Vegas interior will make your jaw hit the floor. The most innovative has to be the Venetian Hotel’s set of canals complete with gondolas, up on the second floor, and its imitation St Mark’s Square, with strolling singers and living statues. Then there’s the Luxor, with its pyramid and Sphinx and all the interior Egyptian detailing. Caesar’s Palace, as its name suggests, splurges on pillars and frescos and everything sumptuous about the Italian Renaissance, while the Cosmopolitan has an arty, street cred vibe, using lots of bright colours and digital technology.
7. See a show
More than 100 auditoriums (a lot of them in hotels) take a lot of filling, so billboards and neon signs scream out show titles wherever you look. Celebrity performers from all eras, from Christina Aguilera to Barry Manilow, do what they call “residencies” — lengthy series of concerts at specific venues. Cirque du Soleil’s two shows are perennial attractions, but there’s every form of live entertainment here, from magic shows to homegrown variety shows, for example in the surreal mix of bawdy comedy and dazzling circus skills of Spiegelworld’s productions Absinthe and Opium.
8. Take a selfie at the sign
The iconic “Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas” sign has sat at the southern end of Las Vegas Boulevard since the 1950s, since when it has featured in many a movie. It’s an integral part of any city tour and there’s usually an orderly queue waiting to take a selfie. This style of 1950s neon is slowly disappearing from much of Vegas, but has been preserved in Downtown’s Neon Museum on Las Vegas Boulevard North, a couple of blocks north of Fremont. The museum’s “boneyard” is a whimsical archive of now redundant signs from an earlier era, still blaring out their messages.
9. Eat until you burst
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Like everything else in Vegas, eating (and drinking) is over the top. For a kaleidoscope of volcanic sweetness try a milkshake at the Black Tap, in the Venetian. Then there’s the unashamedly calorific Heart Attack Grill in Downtown, where waiters are dressed as doctors and customers who weigh over 160kg get to eat for free. And finally there’s Eataly, a restaurant/food hall on a massive scale in a side extension of the MGM Grand, where all the ingredients are shipped in directly from Italy. Here some 10,000 meals are served every day from a variety of specialist stands, mostly collected at the counter, but with two waiter-service sections as well.
10. Meet the mob
The story of how Vegas grew from just a dusty railway station in the middle of the desert is partly told in the Mob Museum in Downtown. Much of the casino business was originally run by mobsters, cashing in on corrupt law enforcement. The museum has the lowdown on key characters, on gangster warfare and the big showpiece trials that took out the big names, in a reconstructed courtroom.
11. Make the earth move
Beyond the big wheels and rollercoasters of Vegas there are all sorts of mountain-busting and desert-driving activities in the immediate vicinity. But one particular novelty just outside town is Dig This, where excavators and loaders lurch around digging holes and filling them in again, under the control of complete novices. If you’ve ever fancied yourself behind the controls of a proper digger then this is your chance to make your mark.
12. Ride a pink Cadillac with Elvis
Stretched limos, presidential SUVs, pink Cadillacs and elongated Hummers have long been the wheels of choice in Vegas, and many of them have on-board bars. Meanwhile there are Elvis footprints everywhere. The singer played a staggering 664 shows in the city, and every other wedding chapel has Elvis impersonators on call. Combine the two on a pink Cadillac tour of the city with your own personal Elvis to sing you on your way.
13. Party by the pool
Once the weather starts to get properly hot in Nevada, from March, Vegas’s famous pool-party season kicks off. Certain hotels with particularly lavish pool areas turn them into adults-only private clubs with names like Wet Republic (MGM Grand) and Tao Beach (the Venetian). There’s cocktail girls, DJs and dancing and cabanas for hire, plus a swimwear dress code. And in case you don’t want to stop gambling, some even have swim-up blackjack tables.
14. Admire art at Palms
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Several showpiece hotels make a feature out of significant art on the premises, but none more so than the Palms Casino Resort, which has an entire suite ($100,000 per night) decorated by Damien Hirst, complete with sharks suspended in formaldehyde. There’s work by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the restaurant and Takashi Murakami in the hallway, plus a trompe l’oeil chapel created by the graphic designer Joshua Vides. It’s all from the collection of the owners, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta.
15. Go high at night
The light shows on the Strip are one thing, but the lights of the city as a whole, from above, are something else. You can get a taste of both worlds from the High Roller, a brightly lit big wheel that is more than 100ft taller than the London Eye, towering over the Strip from behind the Flamingo Hotel. But when it comes to towers, the Vegas veteran is the Stratosphere Tower, which rears up north of the Strip en route to Downtown. This observation tower reaches 1,149ft, the tallest in the United States, and it is topped by a pod that includes a revolving restaurant and a couple of jumping-off and rocketing-upwards rides — best not combined.
16. Fly by
One of the first things you notice on arriving in Las Vegas is how close the airport is to the Strip. That also means easy access to inexpensive helicopter and flightseeing rides, with most people opting for night-time bright-lights options. For daytime flights you can extend a short extra journey out to the Hoover Dam and even the Grand Canyon. There are plenty of balloon ride offerings too, but given the unpredictability of landing, balloons stay out in the desert.
17. Have a cocktail with a view
Many of the hotels here have an observation-deck cocktail bar. From the Foundation Room, 63 floors up on the Mandalay Bay, you can see Vegas spread out below like a magic carpet. Or try the Bond-themed Skyfall Lounge on the 64th floor of the Delano, where everyone prefers their drinks . . . well, you know the rest. But if you want to be seen among the cool crowd then order your Old Fashioned in the Cosmopolitan’s Chandelier bar, whose three floors are welded to a glittering spiral stair and webbed in shimmering drapes of beads, lit by multitudes of crystal chandeliers.
18. Swim with the sharks
The Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino in Downtown is a classic that dates back to 1946. Sections of Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas and the 1971 Bond movie Diamonds are Forever were filmed here, and some of the low-roofed casino sections are original. Mind you, the $30 million pool area, at the centre of the Golden Nugget, was part of a massive renovation and is now the location of a 200,000-gallon aquarium that lies cheek to cheek with the pool, and is threaded through by a waterslide. Swim along eyeballing the sharks without getting eaten.
19. Put your pedal to the metal
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There’s so much artificial, digital entertainment in Vegas, sometimes it is good to get real. For example, by hurtling around a race track in a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, trying to wisecrack like a Top Gear superstar. The Speedway, which is 15 miles north of the Strip, hosts Nascar and other racing events on its multiple tracks, but various drive-yourself supercar packages are available. There’s also the option of taking a rally car out into the dust of the desert.
20. Hike in Red Rock Canyon
Las Vegas is so embedded in its own neon cocoon that it’s easy to forget it is plonked in the middle of the harsh, dry Mojave Desert. And yet from almost any observation deck in town you can see the walls of the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area rising up, only 17 miles west of the city. In fact, there are multiple canyons here, along with ledges and chimneys, chutes and gullies, plus 26 hiking trails and a 13-mile scenic drive. This was once the bed of a massive inland sea, and the eponymous redness comes from the iron content in the rock.
21. Chill by water
Las Vegas consumes one helluva lot of water, and it all comes from Lake Mead, which when full is the largest reservoir in the US. Mead lies some 40 minutes east of the city and was created in the 1930s when the Hoover Dam was built across the Colorado River. The sprawling giant is a paradise for boaters, swimmers, fishermen and anyone looking for water therapy, while the Hoover Dam, a walkable visitor attraction in itself, is a monument to human endeavour. More than 100 workers died during its construction.
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