Las Vegas's Most Iconic Landmarks

The Fountains of Bellagio perform on an eight-acre man-made lake set between the Bellagio resort and Las Vegas Boulevard, one of the most ambitious water features ever built for pure spectacle.

Conceived by the design firm WET and opened with the resort in 1998, the system hides more than a thousand individual jets and hundreds of powerful shooters beneath the surface, programmed to move in tight synchrony with music and light.

During each show the water climbs, sways, and erupts, with the tallest central shooters propelling plumes as high as roughly 460 feet into the air, taller than the resort behind them.

The choreography is set to a rotating repertoire that ranges from opera and Sinatra to Italian arias and contemporary pop, and after dark the jets are lit so that the entire lake becomes a moving canvas of white spray and colored light.

The fountains have become the single most recognizable free attraction on the Strip, a gathering point where crowds line the railings and the pedestrian bridges to watch.

They anchor a stretch of the boulevard that includes the resort's conservatory and the Chihuly glass ceiling in the lobby, so a visit naturally extends into one of the most photographed corners of the city.

The show feels theatrical, but the sheer scale of engineering behind a few minutes of dancing water is genuinely astonishing.

The Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign stands on a median at the southern end of Las Vegas Boulevard, a modest but beloved landmark that has become shorthand for the city itself.

Designed in 1959 by Betty Willis, a Las Vegas native, its diamond-topped shape, buoyant Googie lettering, and cluster of silver dollars spell out a welcome in the optimistic idiom of the postwar Southwest.

Willis famously never trademarked the design, considering it a gift to the city, which is why its image now appears on everything from postcards to souvenirs the world over.

The back of the sign carries its own message, wishing departing visitors a fond farewell and safe travels, so the marker greets and sends off traffic in both directions.

Because it predates most of the towering resorts around it, the sign is a rare survivor from the era when the Strip was a low ribbon of motels and casinos.

The sign was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains a genuine pilgrimage stop, with a small dedicated parking lot added to accommodate the constant stream of visitors wanting their photograph beneath it.

Standing before it, with the resorts rising to the north and the open desert to the south, is a small ritual that nearly every first-time visitor performs, and it captures the city's playful sense of its own mythology.

The Neon Museum preserves the cast-off signage of Las Vegas history in an outdoor collection known as the Neon Boneyard, a two-acre lot crowded with the giant salvaged signs of shuttered casinos, motels, and businesses.

Formally opened to the public in 2012, the museum grew from a long effort to save these irreplaceable artifacts of commercial art before they were scrapped, and it now holds hundreds of pieces spanning decades of the city's design.

Wandering the boneyard is a walk through the visual DNA of Las Vegas: the towering script of the Stardust, the genie lamp of the Aladdin, a giant skull from the Treasure Island, the letters of old motels, and countless smaller relics, each a fragment of a vanished era.

Many are rusted and dark, valued as sculpture, while a growing number have been painstakingly restored to full working glow, so the yard shifts entirely in character between day and night.

The museum's visitor center occupies the rescued lobby of the former La Concha Motel, a swooping shell of mid-century Googie architecture designed by Paul Revere Williams and relocated to the site to save it from demolition.

Guided tours explain the artists, the fabrication techniques, and the stories behind the signs, while an after-dark experience called Brilliant uses projection to reanimate the darkened signs in a choreographed show.

It is at once a museum of graphic design, of technology, and of the city's own memory.

The STRAT, long known as the Stratosphere, rises at the northern end of the Strip as the tallest freestanding observation tower in the United States, its slender white shaft topped by a flaring pod visible from across the valley.

Completed in 1996, it climbs to 1,149 feet, a height that dwarfs the resorts around it and gives its summit an unmatched command of the whole city and the surrounding desert.

The pod near the top holds indoor and outdoor observation decks, a revolving restaurant, and a bar, from which the view sweeps down the length of the Strip in one direction and out over downtown and the mountains in the others.

What sets the tower apart, though, is its collection of thrill rides bolted to the very top: the Big Shot that launches riders straight up the mast, X-Scream that tips them over the edge on a teetering track, and Insanity that spins them out beyond the building on articulated arms.

For the truly fearless there is SkyJump, a controlled descent by cable from the pod down the side of the tower to the ground far below, one of the highest such jumps anywhere.

The combination of a genuine high-altitude observation deck with amusement rides suspended a thousand feet in the air is unique to Las Vegas, and it makes the tower a magnet for anyone chasing a jolt of vertigo with a panoramic view attached.

Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area protects a dramatic sweep of the Mojave Desert just west of the Las Vegas valley, where the earth buckles up into towering cliffs of banded sandstone.

Designated a national conservation area in 1990 and managed by the Bureau of Land Management, its most striking feature is the Keystone Thrust, a place where ancient gray limestone was pushed up and over younger red rock, exposing the vivid crimson and cream layers that give the canyon its name.

A thirteen-mile one-way scenic loop drive threads along the base of the escarpment, with pullouts and trailheads that open onto the Calico Hills, sculpted washes, and hidden springs.

The landscape supports a surprising abundance of desert life, from wild burros and bighorn sheep to blooming cactus and, in the cooler months, seasonal waterfalls in the canyons.

Rock climbers prize the sandstone walls, and the area draws hikers to routes ranging from easy interpretive strolls to strenuous scrambles up to high sandstone summits.

The contrast with the city is the whole point: within a short drive of the Strip's artificial spectacle lies a place of profound natural quiet, where the light shifts across the cliffs through the day and the silence is broken only by wind and birdsong.

For residents and visitors alike it is the essential escape, a reminder that Las Vegas sits in the heart of a vast and beautiful desert.

The Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas is a roughly half-scale replica of the original, rising from the center of the Paris resort that opened in 1999 as part of the Strip's era of themed mega-resorts.

Engineers worked from Gustave Eiffel's original drawings to reproduce the lattice ironwork faithfully, and the resort clusters other Parisian icons around it, including versions of the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre facade, and the Paris Opera House, with the tower's legs straddling the casino floor itself.

The replica was originally intended to be a full-scale copy, but its proximity to the flight paths of the nearby airport forced a reduction to about half height, leaving the observation deck at roughly 460 feet above the boulevard.

A glass elevator carries visitors up through the ironwork to the deck, where the view takes in the full length of the Strip and, most prized of all, a direct overhead look at the Fountains of Bellagio directly across the street.

That placement is the tower's trump card: from the deck you can watch the Bellagio fountains erupt and dance from above, timed shows unfolding in the lagoon below while the resorts glow around you.

At night the tower is illuminated and sparkles on the hour, echoing its Parisian model, and it has become one of the most recognizable silhouettes on the boulevard. It is playful and unabashedly artificial, yet the view it delivers is genuinely first-rate.