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71 Fun Facts About Las Vegas that Kids Will Love

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On the surface, families might not consider Las Vegas a place for kids. Sin City does have plenty of adult-only places that allow gambling and other nefarious activities. However, the city is also chock full of activities and fun facts for kids to enjoy. In fact, many parents bring their children to the Strip and Las Vegas locations for fun family vacations. 

Before bringing children to Las Vegas, take a moment to share some interesting fun facts with them. 

  1. Seventeen of the twenty largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas. 
  2. The largest hotel in the world is in Moscow, while the second-largest is the Venetian Las Vegas and Palazzo with 36 and 53 floors and over 7,017 rooms.
     
  3. The city has more than 150,000 hotel rooms. It would take someone over 400 years to stay one night in every hotel room in the city. 
  4. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, most hotels had an occupancy rate that was near 90% at any time. 
  5. Most Las Vegas visitors come from California, Washington, and Texas. 
  6. The Las Vegas strip actually isn’t in the city of Las Vegas. Clark County has jurisdiction over the popular street. 
  7. With all of the lights emanating from the hotels, Las Vegas is the brightest spot on the planet. 

  8. Las Vegas only gets about four inches of rain annually. When the city floods, it is because of rainfall from the surrounding mountains draining into the Las Vegas Wash, which is a single basin that empties into Lake Mead. 
  9. The Strat is the second tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi at 1,150 feet tall. The tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi isn’t the Gateway Arch in St. Louis; it is the Kennecott Smokestack in Magna, Utah. It stands 1,215 feet tall. 
  10. The Bellagio has more than 1,200 fountains in its famous water show. 
  11. If you took all of the neon tubing and put in a straight line, it would measure more than 15,000 miles. That is about five and half times the distance from New York to Los Angeles. 
  12. More people eat shellfish in Las Vegas in one day than they do in the rest of the United States combined. 
  13. The oldest hotel in Las Vegas is the Golden Gate Hotel & Casino, which first opened as the Hotel Nevada in 1906. It’s on Fremont Street, not on the strip. 
  14. The Golden Gate Hotel & Casino also had the first telephone in Las Vegas. 
  15. When the Nevada legislature legalized gambling in 1931, other states wanted to withdraw Nevada’s statehood. 
  16. There is a town buried at the bottom of Lake Mead. St. Thomas was evacuated in 1938 and Lake Mead covered it. With the drought in the area, the receding shoreline shows the remnants of the old Mormon outpost. 
  17. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Las Vegas hosted over 22,000 conventions annually. That’s about 60 conventions each day. 
  18. Other than tourism, the top industries in Las Vegas include trade, transportation, and utilities. 
  19. Las Vegas has over 50 wedding chapels that host over 300 weddings daily. Istanbul has the second most weddings each day. 
  20. One of the largest bets ever 
  21. Bugsy Siegel, who helped develop Las Vegas into an entertainment mecca, named the Flamingo casino after his girlfriend’s long, skinny legs. 
  22. Howard Hughes did not want to leave the Desert Inn, so he bought it. 
  23. Nevada outlawed the lottery. 
  24. Las Vegas has a hospital-themed restaurant called Heart Attack Grill, where the waitresses dress like nurses and take orders on prescription pads. They sell a burger called the Quadruple Bypass that has over 8,000 calories. 
  25. The Little White Wedding Chapel has a Drive-Thru Tunnel of Vows. Britney Spears once got married there. Her marriage lasted for 55 hours. 
  26. Casinos do not have clocks or windows, so guests lose their sense of time. 
  27. Architects design casinos, so visits have to wander through maze-like layouts to exit the buildings. The goal is to make customers get distracted by the gaming machines and spend more money. 
  28. Vegas Vic on Fremont Street is the largest mechanical neon sign. 
  29. Movie theaters in Nevada have slot machines in their lobbies but not in the auditoriums. 
  30. McCarran Airport has slot machines in its concourses. 
  31. The hourly cost to light up the Luxor pyramid is over $50. The monthly cost exceeds $15,000. 
  32. The bronze lion outside of the MGM Grand Hotel weighs more than 50 tons. 
  33. The fountains and water features outside of Las Vegas hotels use recycled grey water from the bathroom showers and sinks in the area. 
  34. Many Las Vegas bartenders and waiters make more than $100,000 annually. 
  35. Las Vegas has some of the lowest taxes in the country, so many people move there to raise their families. The casinos and tourist attractions put money into roads, schools, and other community necessities. 
  36. Most people do not visit Las Vegas to gamble, but over 70% of tourists over the age of 21 find themselves placing at least one bet while visiting. 
  37. Las Vegas has a park that offers visitors the opportunity to play with heavy equipment like bulldozers and dump trucks. 
  38. Several casinos have black books that include the names of people who are banned from entering. 
  39. Nevada requires casinos to set their slot machines at a minimum of 75% payout. This means at the minimum, if you bet $10, you would get $7.50 back. 
  40. The Palms Casino Resort has a suite with two bowling lanes allowing guests to enjoy private bowling. 
  41. Only two cities in Las Vegas have outlawed gambling: Boulder City and Panaca. Boulder City is outside of Las Vegas, while Panaca is about 170 miles northeast of the Strip, near the Utah border. 
  42. Las Vegas has hundreds of miles of underground tunnels in the Strip and throughout residential and commercial areas. About 1,000 homeless people use the tunnels as their homes. The city constructed the tunnels to manage rain runoff, and most are made of prefabricated concrete squares. The millions of gallons of water they gather ends up in Lake Mead. 
  43. Before Michael Jackson died, he wanted to build a 50-foot robot replica of himself moonwalking as an advertisement for a 2005 concert comeback. 
  44. In 1980, nurses in a Las Vegas hospital were betting on their patients’ times of death. The hospital suspended them, and they investigated one nurse who was thought to be murdering her patients to win the bets. 
  45. The founder of FedEx gambled $5,000 to pay a utility bill. He won $27,000 and saved his company. 
  46. The largest community of Hawaiians living outside of Hawaii are in Las Vegas. 
  47. Only two-thirds of casino thefts happen by guests. Casino employees commit the one one-third of the thefts. 
  48. The Mirage has gold dust in the windows, which is why they look gold from the outside. 
  49. The first casino to hire female dealers was the Silver Slipper. 
  50. The movie Casino is set at the Tangiers Casino, but in reality that casino does not exist. 
  51. A 25-year-old software engineer won $39 million on a $100 slot machine bet at the Excalibur casino. This was the largest slot machine win in Las Vegas history. His odds of winning were 1 in 16.7 willing. 
  52. Elvis Presley performed in over 830 sold-out shows before his death. Every show was at the former Las Vegas Hilton. 
  53. The sphinx at the Luxor is taller than the original Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. 
  54. Every casino uses dice with squared edges. None have rounded corners. 
  55. Las Vegas is in the Mojave Desert, which is the smallest desert in the United States. Despite being the smallest, it is the hottest. The Chihuahuan Desert and the Sonoran Desert are in the United States and Northern Mexico. Death Valley isn’t far from Las Vegas and is a desert valley in the northern Mojave Desert.
  56. The ratio of slot machines to Las Vegas residents is about one to eight. 
  57. Before it was The Strip, Las Vegas Boulevard was 5th Street, Los Angeles Highway, Salt Lake Highway, US 93, State Route 6, and Arrowhead Highway. A former Los Angeles police officer gave The Strip its name after being inspired by the Sunset Strip in his hometown. He named The Strip after the mobsters moved out and the corporations started building massive hotels and casinos in the 1970s and 1980s. 
  58. Nevada is The Silver State. So, when Betty Willis designed the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, she added white circles around the world welcome to symbolize silver dollars. No one ever copyrighted that sign, which is why it appears on so many tourist tchotchkes. 
  59. More people have unlisted telephone numbers in Las Vegas than in any other city in the United States. 
  60. If you wanted to buy land on The Strip, you would have to pay about $5 million for each acre. According to Clark County assessments, the Wynn Las Vegas and its golf course occupy 183.6 acres. Mandalay Bay occupies 118.9 acres. Clark County registered Excalibur and Luxor as one deed, and together they occupy 108 acres. The MGM Grand sits on 91.8 acres. The Mirage takes up 77 acres. 
  61. The Wynn Las Vegas is the most expensive casino and hotel in the United States, as was once the most expensive in the world. Now the most expensive hotel in the world is the Abraj Al-Bait in Saudi Arabia. It has seven skyscraper hotels and sits next to the Great Mosque of Mecca. It cost about $15 billion to build, also making it the most expensive building in the world. 
  62. Liberace, the famous pianist, earned $300,000 weekly for his shows at the Las Vegas Hilton. 
  63. When designers created the Wynn Las Vegas, they had Asian visitors in mind. Some Asian cultures believe that the number 4 brings bad luck. So, the Wynn Las Vegas does not have a fourth floor. It also does not have floors 40 through 49. It skips from 39 to 50 in its floor-numbering system. Because of this, many Chinese visitors stay at the Wynn to celebrate the Chinese New Year in style. 
  64. The Bellagio hotel’s namesake, the town of Bellagio, Italy, has fewer residents than the hotel has rooms. The Bellagio has 3,933 rooms, while about 3,800 people live in the small Italian town. 
  65. The Golden Nugget hotel does not have any golden nuggets in it. However, people frequently ask the hoteliers where the golden nuggets are and how much they weigh. 
  66. People visit the Las Vegas area to hike the canyons and hills in the area. Two of the most popular areas to hike are the Red Rocks Canyon National Conservation Area and the Valley of Fire State Park. 
  67. In the winter, visitors to Las Vegas can go snow skiing on Mount Charleston. The mountain has an elevation of nearly 12,000 feet. At resorts like Lee Canyon, visitors can also snowboard, snowshoe, and tube down and around the mountain. In the summer, visitors enjoy the cooler temperatures for hiking and mountain biking. 
  68. Because Las Vegas is so hot, many people think it is south of Los Angeles. In fact, the city is northeast of Los Angeles. Drivers need about four hours to travel from one city to the other. The halfway point is a town called Newberry Springs, California. 
  69. Las Vegas is not an original destination on Route 66. The closest stop on Route 66 is Kingman, Arizona. 
  70. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are at historically low water levels. The Colorado River feeds these lakes, and nearly 90% of Las Vegas gets its water from the Colorado River. The federal government issued its first-ever water-shortage declaration, asking the people and businesses in southern Nevada to stop watering non-functional grass.
  71. Las Vegas visitors who enjoy kayaking can arrange a drop-off at the base of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. While kayaking the Black Canyon area, they can explore hot springs and caves and see remnants of an old railroad.
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A seasoned traveller, Dad, and avid sports tourist, James foundered The Family Vacation Guide to share his expert vacation experiences- especially when it comes to being a travelling family man.

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