Caesars Palace

Caesars Palace opened in August 1966 and is the oldest of the great themed resorts still standing on the Strip. The name has no apostrophe, and that is deliberate: the conceit from the beginning was that every guest is a Caesar, so the palace belongs to all of them rather than to one.

It was the first Las Vegas resort to commit wholly to a theme, and everything from the Luxor to the Venetian is descended from the idea it proved — that a hotel could be a stage set.

The Colosseum

The theatre built across the front of the hotel in 2003, specifically to house a single long residency, and the building that established the modern Las Vegas residency as a format. It seats around 4,300 — a figure older accounts sometimes garble into square feet, which would make it the size of a flat.

The residencies rotate, and they rotate faster than any article can track: the names that filled it through the 2000s and 2010s have all finished their runs. Anyone planning around a particular performer should check who is actually booked rather than rely on a list.

The hotel's reputation for booking goes back much further — Sinatra played here through the 1970s and 1980s, after the Sands — and the venue remains the Strip's principal room for a single act rather than a production show.

Around the building

  • The Forum Shops, the Roman streetscape under a painted sky that cycles from dawn to dusk. It opened in 1992, invented the resort shopping mall as an attraction in itself, and is covered under Las Vegas shopping.
  • The Garden of the Gods, four and a half acres of pools and marble arranged as a Roman bath complex, with several separate pools at different temperatures. It is the best pool complex on the Strip and the reason a good many people stay here.
  • Qua Baths and Spa, which includes an Arctic ice room — a chamber in which artificial snow falls — and which makes more sense in a city at 40°C than it sounds.
  • The casino, in several connected rooms rather than one, which is unusual on the Strip and makes it feel less like an aircraft hangar.

One thing worth knowing

On the last day of 1967, Evel Knievel attempted to jump the fountains at the front of the hotel on a motorcycle. He cleared them and lost control on landing, and the crash — filmed, and very bad — made him internationally famous and nearly killed him. The fountains are still there.

Eating, and the problem with naming restaurants

Caesars has one of the largest collections of restaurants of any resort in the city, several of them run by well-known chefs. Specific names are deliberately omitted here: the turnover in Las Vegas restaurant tenancies is rapid, and almost every restaurant named in accounts of this hotel written fifteen years ago has since closed. The hotel's own current listing is the only reliable source.

Position

Centrally placed on the west side of the Strip, with the Bellagio, the Cosmopolitan and the Venetian all within walking distance, and the High Roller wheel and the LINQ promenade immediately across the Boulevard.

The other resorts are under Las Vegas hotels; general practicalities are on the Las Vegas page.

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