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Las Vegas
A desert resort city in the Mojave
Las Vegas sits in a broad desert valley in southern Nevada, deep in the Mojave Desert and ringed by bare, sun-baked mountains. The name — Spanish for "the meadows" — recalls the artesian springs that once made this a green oasis on the route across the desert, a rare source of water that fixed the settlement's site in an otherwise bone-dry basin. The springs are long gone, but the city they seeded exploded in the 20th century.
What made the modern city possible was Hoover Dam, completed in 1936 just downstream, whose reservoir, Lake Mead, supplies the water and whose power lit the resorts. Legalized gambling turned Las Vegas into the entertainment capital of the country, its neon Strip rising improbably from the desert floor. One of the fastest-growing metros in the nation, it sits in one of the hottest, driest corners of the United States.