Las Vegas, a city in the United States, is one of the most visited cities globally, attracting millions of tourists every year. Its reputation as an entertainment capital and the largest playground for adults makes it a top travel destination. The city is home to around 1.5 million hotel rooms, making it the city with the most hotel rooms globally.
Despite being a relatively young city and having a small metropolitan population of less than 2.2 million, Las Vegas is a major tourist hub. The city's economy is significantly boosted by the billions of dollars contributed by tourists each year.
Las Vegas is located in the Mojave Desert, the driest and least hospitable desert in North America. The city's extreme dryness is largely due to its geographical location, which is within a rain shadow cast by the Sierra Nevada mountains.
The city's history is closely tied to the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, which created the largest water reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead. This led to the growth of Las Vegas's unique entertainment industry.
Las Vegas is renowned for its water efficiency. The city has enacted several policies and engineering decisions to recycle water, making it one of the most water-efficient cities globally. Despite being allocated only 4% of the lower Colorado River's water, Las Vegas has managed to reduce its total water consumption dramatically.
The city has also banned non-functional and decorative grass, replacing it with more drought-tolerant desert landscaping. This is expected to save around 9.5 billion gallons of water a year.
However, the city's water supply is under threat due to climate change and the increasing demand for water. The Colorado River, which supplies Las Vegas with water, is expected to have its water levels drop over the next several decades.
Despite these challenges, Las Vegas continues to adapt and innovate, providing a model for other cities facing similar water security issues.
1. Las Vegas is one of the most well-known cities in the world, with millions of people visiting every single year.
2. It is the third most visited city in the United States by foreign tourists, just behind New York and Miami.
3. Las Vegas has around 150,000 hotel rooms, more than any other city on the planet.
4. Despite being a relatively young city, Las Vegas has a relatively small metropolitan population of only slightly more than 2.2 million people.
5. The city is located in the Mojave Desert, the driest and least hospitable desert of the North American continent.
6. The Mojave Desert is so dry that the area around Las Vegas only receives an average of around four inches of rainfall per year.
7. Las Vegas was officially founded in 1905 and incorporated in 1911.
8. The city of Las Vegas was born when the Hoover Dam was finished in 1936, creating the largest water reservoir in the entire United States.
9. Las Vegas has been rapidly learning how to adapt to a changing environment.
10. The city of Las Vegas is one of the most water-efficient cities in the world.
11. The city of Las Vegas has managed to reduce their total water consumption dramatically by 26% over the past 20 years.
12. The city of Las Vegas has enacted a number of ingenious policy and engineering decisions to achieve this incredible rate of water recycling.
13. The city of Las Vegas has banned non-functional and decorative grass in the city to save water.
14. The Southern Nevada Water Authority believes that these simple landscaping measures favoring sustainable desert landscaping over non-functional grass will save around nine and a half billion gallons of water a year.
15. The city of Las Vegas is the model city for the rest of the Southwestern United States as the region faces increasingly harsher drought conditions and decreasing water supplies.
16. The city of Las Vegas is well-designed to cope with the challenges of 21st-century climate change in the middle of one of Earth's least hospitable desert environments.