The Mirage

The Mirage closed on 17 July 2024. The volcano, the rainforest atrium, the aquarium behind the front desk, the white tigers, the dolphins and the Beatles show have all gone, and the building is being rebuilt as a guitar-shaped Hard Rock expected to open in 2027.

It is worth setting down what was here, because no hotel on the Strip mattered more. The Mirage is the building that invented the modern Las Vegas resort, and every themed megaresort that followed was built because this one worked.

Why it mattered

The Mirage opened on 22 November 1989, built by Steve Wynn, and it was the most expensive hotel-casino ever constructed at that point. It was also the first new resort on the Strip in sixteen years. The arithmetic was considered reckless: the property had to take something in the order of a million dollars a day simply to service its debt, and the industry view was that no casino could.

It could. The Mirage made money immediately, and in doing so it rewrote what a Las Vegas resort was for. Before it, a casino sold gambling and put a hotel on top. After it, a casino sold spectacle — a volcano, a rainforest, white tigers, a theatre built for one act — and let the gambling follow the crowd in. Everything from the Luxor to the Bellagio to the Venetian exists because the Mirage proved the model.

The volcano did something subtler and more lasting. By putting a free show on the pavement, it turned Las Vegas Boulevard itself into an attraction, and the Strip became a street people walked rather than drove between car parks. The fountains at the Bellagio, the pirate battle at Treasure Island and everything else outdoors descends from that decision.

What was in it

  • The volcano, on three water-covered acres in front of the hotel, erupting on the hour after dark. It was rebuilt in 2008 by the firm that built the Bellagio fountains, with a soundtrack by Mick Fleetwood and Zakir Hussain. It also, famously, released a piña colada scent — ostensibly to mask the smell of the gas.
  • The atrium, a rainforest under a glass dome inside the front doors, with palms and running water.
  • The aquarium behind the reception desk — twenty thousand gallons of seawater and around a thousand animals, which guests checked in in front of.
  • Siegfried and Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat, and the White Tiger Habitat. The tiger show ended after Roy Horn was badly injured on stage on 3 October 2003; the habitats outlived it by twenty years. Roy Horn died in 2020 and Siegfried Fischbacher in 2021.
  • Love, the Cirque du Soleil show built on the Beatles' catalogue, which ran from 2006 until the hotel closed.

What happened to the animals

The Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat wound down as the resort did. Several of the dolphins were returned to SeaWorld San Diego under the terms of the loan agreement that had brought them, and the remainder were relocated. The dolphin programme had attracted sustained criticism from marine welfare groups throughout its thirty-odd years, and its closure was not mourned by all of them.

What is coming

Hard Rock took over the property in December 2022 and closed it in July 2024 to rebuild. The replacement is to be a Hard Rock Hotel and Casino with a tower in the shape of a guitar — the same device the company built in Florida — and the target is 2027.

Until then there is nothing here to visit, and any itinerary that includes the Mirage needs rewriting. The resorts that are open are covered under Las Vegas hotels.

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