The Oldest Hotels on the Las Vegas Strip

The Las Vegas Strip is a roughly 4.2 mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard in Clark County, Nevada, running through the unincorporated towns of Paradise and Winchester just south of the Las Vegas city limits. Most of it is designated an All-American Road, and many of the largest hotels in the world stand along it. It is also a place that rarely keeps its buildings for long, with casinos imploded, rebuilt, and rebranded so often that the question of which hotel is oldest has a moving answer. Plenty of the Strip's pioneers are already gone, so the honest version of this list counts only the hotels still standing and open today. By that measure, here are the five oldest, followed by a full ranking of the ten oldest survivors.

1. Flamingo Las Vegas (1946)

The Flamingo is the oldest hotel and casino still operating on the Strip. Its casino opened on December 26, 1946, a project begun by Hollywood Reporter founder Billy Wilkerson but finished and opened by the mobster Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, whose backers watched construction costs balloon to about $6 million. Siegel named it after his girlfriend Virginia Hill, who was nicknamed the Flamingo, and the grand opening was a flop, since the unfinished hotel could not keep gamblers around overnight and the casino lost money for weeks. Siegel was shot dead in Beverly Hills in June 1947, roughly six months after the doors opened, in a killing that has never been solved.

It was actually the third resort to reach the Strip, after El Rancho Vegas in 1941 and the Last Frontier in 1942, but both of those are long gone, which leaves the Flamingo as the senior survivor. The original buildings were gradually replaced, and the last of them came down in 1993, though the resort never closed during the rebuilding. The Hilton chain owned it for decades as the Flamingo Hilton, and today it belongs to Caesars Entertainment, carries 3,626 rooms, and keeps a four acre wildlife habitat where live Chilean flamingos and other birds share a garden courtyard near a memorial to Siegel himself.

2. Sahara Las Vegas (1952)

The Sahara opened on October 7, 1952 at the north end of the Strip in Winchester, a Moroccan themed resort built by the contractor Del Webb for owner Milton Prell. It quickly became one of the Strip's social centers and a Las Vegas base for the Rat Pack, with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. all performing there, while its Casbah Lounge and Congo Room drew headline acts for decades. The Beatles stayed at the Sahara during their 1964 American tour.

The resort ran under the Sahara name until it closed in 2011. It reopened in 2014 as the SLS Las Vegas, but the SLS branding never caught on with gamblers, and after Alex Meruelo's Meruelo Group bought the property in 2018 the company restored the historic name, reopening it as Sahara Las Vegas in 2019. It now has about 1,616 rooms, hosts the northernmost stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, and anchors the quieter top end of the boulevard.

3. The Linq, Formerly the Flamingo Capri Motel (1959)

The property now known as The Linq opened in 1959 as the Flamingo Capri Motel, built just north of the Flamingo. Over the following decades it grew and changed hands repeatedly, operating for many years as the Imperial Palace and then briefly as The Quad, before a roughly $223 million renovation turned it into The Linq Hotel in 2014.

Owned by Caesars Entertainment, it now carries about 2,600 rooms and anchors the open air Linq Promenade, a pedestrian lane of shops, bars, and restaurants that runs back from the Strip. At its far end stands the High Roller, a 550 foot observation wheel that was the tallest in the world when it opened in 2014.

4. Planet Hollywood (1963)

Planet Hollywood sits on one of the Strip's older addresses, though the property has reinvented itself more than almost any other. It opened in 1963 as the Tallyho, a resort so unusual that it had no casino at all, and it closed within its first year. It returned as the King's Crown Tallyho, and in 1966 the gaming operator Milton Prell rebuilt it with an Arabian theme as the Aladdin, which went on to host the May 1967 wedding of Elvis and Priscilla Presley.

The original Aladdin was imploded in 1998 and replaced by an entirely new resort that opened in 2000. That resort was rebranded Planet Hollywood in 2007 and has belonged to Caesars Entertainment since 2010. Today it holds more than 2,500 rooms, wraps around the Miracle Mile Shops, and stages headline concert residencies in its 7,000 seat theater at the center of the Strip.

5. Caesars Palace (1966)

Caesars Palace opened in August 1966, the creation of casino developer Jay Sarno and his partner Stanley Mallin, who themed the entire resort around imperial Rome, complete with fountains, marble columns, and staff in togas. It was an immediate landmark and helped push the Strip toward the lavish, fully themed mega resorts that followed. In 1967 the daredevil Evel Knievel attempted to jump its fountains on a motorcycle and crashed badly, an event that only added to the property's fame.

It has operated continuously under the same name ever since, expanding many times into the vast complex that now includes the upscale Forum Shops and the Colosseum, a theater built for Celine Dion's long running residency and since used by many other headliners. More than half a century on, it remains one of the most recognizable casinos in the world.

The Ten Oldest Hotels Still Operating on the Las Vegas Strip

The Cromwell, which opened as the Barbary Coast in 1979, is being rebranded as The Vanderpump Hotel in 2026.

An Ever Changing Skyline

The Strip's earliest pioneers did not survive. Its first resort, El Rancho Vegas, opened in 1941 and burned down in 1960 in a fire that was never explained. The second, the Last Frontier, opened in 1942, later became the New Frontier, hosted Elvis Presley's first Las Vegas performance, and was demolished in 2007. The Tropicana, which opened in 1957 and spent decades as one of the Strip's landmarks, was imploded in 2024 to clear the way for a baseball stadium for the relocating Athletics. The teardowns keep coming, with the Mirage closing in 2024 to be rebuilt as a Hard Rock and the Stardust replaced by Resorts World back in 2021. That constant churn is exactly why the Flamingo, opened in 1946, still holds the title of oldest hotel operating on the Strip.