Shimmering brightly from the vast desert of central Nevada, Las Vegas is the most dynamic, spectacular, and easily the most entertaining city on planet Earth. Since the start of the 20th century, it didn’t even exist; at the start of the twenty-first, it then became home to home to a population of over one million people, with enough new residents arriving to need a new school every single month. Las Vegas is not like other cities. No other city in history has so explicitly valued the needs and requests of visitors above those of its own population, the city of Las Vegas. All of Vegas’ growth has been credited by the immense growth of the tourism industry, but the tourists haven’t spoiled the actual city since there is no real city, only the outlying city of Henderson that does boast some popular attractions itself.
The entertainment capital, Las Vegas doesn’t have fascinating small town like neighborhoods, and it’s not a place where visitors can go off the beaten track to have more authentic experiences. There are places where you can venture outside of the city such as the beautiful Mount Charleston and the Valley of Fire Canyon. Also, the whole tourism industry is completely self-referential; the reason Las Vegas hosts most of the vast majority of the world’s largest hotels and resorts and that is estimated to be around thirty-seven million tourists each year come to see the hotels themselves.
Photo by: Steve Woods