The entertainment capital of the world beckons—with big-ticket live shows, top restaurants, and outlandish attractions all sure bets
Your essential guide to the best things to see and do in Las Vegas. Find more travel inspiration for more amazing cities here.
Built from the desert at the start of the 20th century, Sin City is synonymous with sensory overload and unbridled hedonism; a favorite stomping ground for celebrities and the ultra-wealthy as much as for everyday tourists from all over the world. But there’s far more to Vegas than you might expect. There are cavernous casinos, pulsing nightclubs, and big-ticket live shows, yes; but there’s also a global melting pot of cultures and innovation constantly reshaping the city, from its dynamic food scene to its world-class entertainment.
Las Vegas sometimes looks—and feels—like a sprawling theme park for adults, with its towering High Roller observation wheel, endless arrays of bright, flashing lights, and outsized replicas of world icons like the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and Egyptian-style pyramids. Las Vegas Boulevard, aka the Strip, is the main thoroughfare here, and it’s lined by many of the city’s most iconic hotels such as Caesars Palace, the Bellagio, and The Venetian.
About a 10-minute drive north is the Vegas of old, known as Downtown Las Vegas, where this city of fantasy first bloomed in the desert in the 1920s. Lined with vintage neon signs beckoning visitors to its hotel casinos, the pedestrian-only thoroughfare of Fremont Street is alive with bustling bars and restaurants, street performers, and wandering tourists clutching foot-long plastic cocktail vessels.
But it wasn’t always such a vibrant scene: As the action shifted from Downtown to the burgeoning Strip in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Fremont Street started to decline, but it then bounced back with a successful $70-million revitalization effort in the mid-’90s. The project leaned into the cool vintage feel of the hotels there, placed a canopy—complete with digital light show—over Fremont Street, and later added new attractions like the SlotZilla zip line.
Close to Downtown, the Insta-ready Neon Museum preserves the city’s most iconic art form in an outdoor exhibition of salvaged and restored signs from shuttered Las Vegas hotels and businesses. Book a docent-led tour at dusk to see the signs at their most enchanting. At The Mob Museum, learn the story of the city’s underbelly, while the newly opened Punk Rock Museum features an extensive collection of artifacts and memorabilia spanning the history of punk music, with guided tours led by in-person legends of the scene.
The Arts District section of Downtown Las Vegas is also home to First Friday, a free monthly event showcasing the vibrant local artist community with open galleries and live music.
If your senses eventually need a break from all the flashing, ringing and revelry, plan a day trip to Hoover Dam, an impressive feat of engineering about 40 miles east of the Strip that controls the flow of the Colorado River. The scale of it alone is impressive.
Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) serves over 50 million travelers annually. It gets extremely busy, so leave ample time to get to and through the airport. It’s located just minutes south of the Strip and there are multiple group shuttle services available in the terminals for $8–10 per person. Otherwise, taxis and rideshares are plentiful, but pricey.
The Las Vegas Monorail takes riders from MGM Grand all the way to the Sahara with multiple stops along the way, including the Convention Center. MGM Resorts offers two free express trams that connect Mandalay Bay, Luxor, and Excalibur, and Park MGM, Aria, and Bellagio.
Regional transit buses run along the Strip all the way downtown 24 hours a day. You can also explore Downtown Las Vegas on the free Downtown Loop shuttle service or through the city’s popular bike share program.
For those with accessibility needs, Las Vegas is tremendously accommodating—hotels, showrooms, casinos, restaurants, and pools all have ADA-accessible rooms, entries, seating, and other features, as do taxis and public transit. Many attractions are fully wheelchair accessible, including AREA15, although visitors with sensory issues should note that lasers, strobe lights, and high intensity sound are used in parts of the attraction.
LGBTQ+ travelers will find multiple welcoming bars throughout the city catering to a variety of different scenes, as well as LGBTQ+ owned and operated hotels. Favorite night spots include The Garage bar, with its service-station theme, and Piranha Nightclub, featuring drag shows and an outdoor patio. And don’t forget about pool parties: In summer, gay-geared Temptation Sundays at The Luxor is the place to be. Meanwhile, Pride month is a big deal and is celebrated on and off the Strip, but note that Las Vegas Pride is held in October, with its parade taking place at night, to avoid the summer heat.
In a city full of celebrity chefs, José Andrés serves up some of the most inventive and consistently excellent offerings: At Jaleo at The Cosmopolitan hotel, approachable molecular gastronomy meets massive paellas, while Bazaar Meat in the Sahara hotel is a celebration of Spanish steak culture and the carnivorous culinary arts.
For a see-and-be-seen scene, Cathédrale at Aria is the hottest new restaurant in town, an over-the-top dining spectacle for the well-heeled. Stanton Social Prime, a new hotspot at Caesars Palace, is jaw-droppingly gorgeous and delivers decadent dishes designed to be shared—both with your friends and on your socials.
“Hidden” cocktail bars are très chic in Vegas right now. Tucked away near the “Italian American Psychedelic” restaurant Superfrico at The Cosmopolitan, the Ski Lodge offers après-ski ambience (sans snow) year-round.
As the entertainment capital of the world, Vegas is known for its shows, and particularly for Cirque du Soleil. The hype is wholly deserved; the athleticism and artistry on display are consistently jaw-dropping. But if you can only see one production, make it O at the Bellagio—it is an absolute triumph.
Equally as impressive, but on the NC-17 end of the spectrum, Spiegelworld’s Absinthe at Caesars Palace takes the Cirque formula of soaring acrobats and gravity-defying feats of strength and injects it with a more adults-only attitude, all in an intimate setting.
Over the last decade, the Vegas residency has transformed into a vehicle for A-listers to present elaborate shows on intimate stages. Adele and Garth Brooks return in 2024 to the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, while Kylie Minogue and Christina Aguilera both bring cabaret acts to Voltaire, the sultry new venue inside The Venetian with a capacity of just 1,000 people.
Electronic dance music (EDM) is part of Las Vegas’s DNA with all of the Strip’s superclubs, but Electric Daisy Carnival is EDM’s annual gathering of acolytes. Taking place each May, it’s the largest dance festival in North America, featuring nine larger-than-life stages, each with their own themes and elaborate set pieces, expansive LED panels, elaborate light displays, and pyrotechnics.
In Downtown Las Vegas, Life is Beautiful is an art, music, and food festival that takes over 18 square blocks each September. Showcasing some of the biggest names in pop, hip-hop, indie rock, and EDM, LiB has also been transforming the area’s image over the last decade through its mural program, showcasing some of the world’s most renowned street artists.
Wow museums to see now
The buzziest spot in town is Sphere, a fully immersive, 4D venue featuring the largest and highest-resolution screen in the world, which opened in 2023. Whether you opt for U2’s Achtung Baby Live or Darren Aronofsky’s film Postcard from Earth, the 160,000 square feet of wraparound images are eye-popping. Even just watching the 366-foot-tall structure’s ever-changing LED exosphere from any vantage point around town is an incredible sight.
And one of America’s most visited attractions in 2022 was AREA15, a 200,000-square-foot experiential entertainment zone with immersive alternate worlds behind every door. One highlight is Omega Mart, a mind-bending grocery store from the world-renowned Meow Wolf art collective.
Not really a “neighborhood” in the strictest sense, the Strip is the reason people come to Las Vegas—it is, by most accounts, the most popular tourist attraction in the world, after all. Lined with iconic mega-resorts like the Bellagio and Caesars Palace; simulacra of the Eiffel Tower, Brooklyn Bridge, and Venice canals; and 15,000 miles’ worth of neon tubing, the Las Vegas Strip has no equal.
Encompassing the pedestrian-only, LED canopy-covered Fremont Street Experience, the Fremont East entertainment district, and the trendy Arts District, Downtown Las Vegas has become a popular place for travelers looking for an alternative to the glitz of the Strip. Here you can find trendy dining, unique vintage shopping, and a stretch of local craft breweries known as Brewery Row.
Just a mile west of the Strip, Las Vegas Chinatown continues to be the city’s hidden-in-plain-sight gem. Stretching over three miles, Chinatown is home to more than 150 restaurants representing cuisines from all over the world. Check out Raku, China Mama, Sparrow + Wolf, and Xiao Long Dumplings to start, and don’t skip Golden Tiki, a rockabilly-pirate-tiki bar full of the shrunken heads of Las Vegas personalities.
Nicole Rupersburg is a freelance food and travel writer whose work has appeared in Thrillist, Matador, Travelocity, Cosmopolitan, and more. She believes in the joys of being a tourist in your own city—especially when that city is fabulous Las Vegas—but travels frequently throughout the Southwest region to go hiking, eating, and exploring.
