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 552,539 (2006).

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.

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. 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 there 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 48 km (30 mi) 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 first topped US$1 million per day. In the 1990s, Las Vegas experienced a further building boom of casinos, resorts, and housing.

Las Vegas had fewer than 40,000 residents in 1940, that figure multiplied by a factor of 25 in the 50 years that followed, 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” and, as a result, house building, landscaping, residential security, and different kinds of clean manufacturing processes contribute to the increasingly mixed Las Vegas economy.