Caesars Palace

Caesars Palace occupies the west side of the Las Vegas Strip at Flamingo Road, behind a drive lined with cypresses, fountains and statues of Roman emperors. It opened on 5 August 1966, the creation of the developer Jay Sarno, and it is the oldest of the grand resorts on the Strip still trading under its original name. Six decades of expansion have produced a complex of towers, a shopping forum, a 4,100-seat theatre and the largest pool complex of any luxury hotel in Las Vegas.

History

Jay Sarno and his partner Stanley Mallin financed the hotel with a loan from the Teamsters pension fund and opened it with a three-day party in August 1966. Sarno chose the name without an apostrophe so that every guest could feel like a Caesar. On 31 December 1967 Evel Knievel attempted to jump the fountains at the entrance on his motorcycle and crashed, an accident broadcast around the world that made both him and the hotel famous. Frank Sinatra began performing at Caesars in 1968, and the hotel became the home of championship boxing in the 1980s, staging the fights of Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, Sugar Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler in temporary outdoor arenas.

The Forum Shops opened in 1992, the first of the Strip's great shopping galleries, under a ceiling painted as a changing sky. The Colosseum opened in March 2003 for Celine Dion, whose A New Day ran until 2007 and who returned from 2011 to 2019; Elton John, Cher, Rod Stewart and Adele have also held residencies there. Films from Rain Man in 1988 to The Hangover in 2009 were shot in the hotel. Caesars Entertainment operates the resort, and the real estate has belonged to VICI Properties since 2017.

Architecture and design

The original hotel, by the Miami architect Melvin Grossman, was a 14-storey curved slab fronted by fountains, a motif that still frames the entrance. Later towers rose around it: the Forum Tower, the Palace Tower in 1997, the Augustus Tower in 2005, the Octavius Tower in 2012 and the Nobu Hotel inside the former Centurion Tower in 2013. The decorative vocabulary is Roman throughout, with marble, columns, statuary and coffered ceilings, and the Garden of the Gods, the pool complex, is laid out with Roman gardens, temples and seven pools over several acres.

Rooms and suites

The resort has about 3,960 rooms and suites in six towers. The Augustus and Octavius towers hold the newer rooms and the largest suites, including villas with private pools on the Octavius Tower. Nobu Hotel, opened in 2013, was the first hotel of the Japanese restaurant group and occupies its own tower with its own lobby. The Julius Tower, the original 1966 building, was renovated in 2016.

Dining

Restaurant Guy Savoy, opened in 2006, is the only restaurant of the Paris chef outside France. Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, opened in 2018 at the Strip entrance, Nobu, the Bacchanal Buffet of 2012 and a row of steakhouses and cafés complete the dining. The Forum Shops hold further restaurants with terraces on the Strip.

Wellness

Qua Baths & Spa offers Roman baths, an arctic ice room, treatment rooms and a fitness centre. The Garden of the Gods pool complex is open in season, with the Venus pool reserved for adults.

Weddings and events

Caesars Palace has about 300,000 square feet of meeting space in its own convention centre, with the Augustus and Octavius ballrooms as the largest rooms and dozens of smaller salons. The Caesars Forum conference centre, opened across the Strip in 2020, extends the group's capacity for large congresses. Weddings use the hotel's chapels and the gardens of the pool complex for ceremonies, and the ballrooms, private dining rooms or the Nobu Hotel for receptions.

Location

The hotel is at 3570 South Las Vegas Boulevard, at the corner of Flamingo Road, in the centre of the Strip. Bellagio is across Flamingo Road, The Mirage site and The Venetian lie to the north, and the Flamingo and The LINQ promenade face it across the boulevard. Harry Reid International Airport lies about 6 kilometres off, a taxi ride of about 15 minutes.