Las Vegas

Las Vegas, city, Nevada, United States. A famous tourist resort and convention centre, the city has numerous luxury high-rise hotels and glittering gambling casinos (many located on the Strip, a major thoroughfare). Nevada's largest city, Las Vegas also serves as the commercial centre for the surrounding region. Population 545,147 (2005 estimate).

Although Las Vegas bills itself as the “entertainment capital of the world”, its economy in fact turns around an intriguing mixture of activities. While generally thought of as a haven for gaming (the word gambling is considered inelegant in Nevada), Las Vegas is pitched as a haven for family entertainment. For all the glamour, the US federal government remains an economic and physical fact of southern Nevada life — with Nellis Air Force Base, the proposed permanent nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain, and a number of military bases all based out of Las Vegas.

The University of Nevada-Las Vegas (1957) is in the city. Nellis Air Force Base (a major regional employer), Lake Mead National Recreation Area, and the Hoover Dam are nearby. The Nevada State Museum and Historical Society features exhibits on Nevada's history from 12,000 bc to 1950. Major sporting events are held at the Sam Boyd Silver Bowl, home to the Las Vegas Posse of the Canadian Football League. Casinos, tours, and outdoor activities, such as pirate duels on artificial lakes, laser cannons, and the Circus-Circus Grand Slam Canyon, are immensely popular, as are casino shows and the numerous wedding chapels.

The city's name, Spanish for “the meadows”, refers to grassland seen along spring-fed desert streams by early Spanish explorers of the area. The area was home to the Paiute, who hunted, fished, and gathered roots, piñon nuts, and other foods. The first white settlers were Mormons, who maintained a colony on the site from 1855 to 1857. Fort Baker was built here by the United States Army in 1864 to guard a route to California, and the modern community was established in 1905 with the coming of the railway. Floods in 1907 and 1910 washed out the rail lines, and a financial panic in 1907 devastated the mining industry in the surrounding area. The city's main growth began in the 1930s, when Hoover Dam was built 30 miles away on the Colorado River. Dam construction began in 1931, the same year that Nevada legalized gambling. The first casino opened in Las Vegas in 1946, and the city's population increased greatly in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1974 daily gambling revenues in Las Vegas topped one million dollars per day. In the 1990s, Las Vegas experienced a building boom of casinos, resorts, and housing. In 1980 84 people were killed by a fire in the former MGM Grand hotel. Three major hotels—including the new MGM Grand, one of the world's largest, built at a total cost of US$1.85 billion—opened in 1993.

Las Vegas is the fastest-growing of all metropolitan areas in the United States, boasting a population increase of 13.9 per cent from 1990-1992. Although it had fewer than 40,000 residents in 1940, that figure has multiplied by a factor of 25 in the last 50 years, amounting to growth without precedent for any major American city. Increasingly, Las Vegas is home to former Pacific Coast residents decamping California to move to the “Silver State”. Disenchanted California migrants constitute about 60 per cent of the newcomers to Las Vegas, and as a result, house building, landscaping, residential security, and different kinds of clean manufacturing processes contribute to the increasingly mixed Las Vegas economy.