Mirage (closed 2024)
The volcano resort that started the megaresort era — now closing to be reborn with a guitar-shaped tower.
Key facts
- The Mirage opened in 1989, developed by Steve Wynn and built at a cost of about $630 million, financed heavily with roughly $525 million in high-yield “junk” bonds; it is widely credited as the first modern Las Vegas megaresort, and featured an erupting artificial volcano, a white-tiger habitat and a dolphin habitat.
- Siegfried & Roy performed their white-tiger stage show at the Mirage from 1990 until 2003, when the act ended after a tiger seized Roy Horn on stage during a performance.
- The Mirage closed on July 17, 2024, and is being converted into a Hard Rock resort with a planned guitar-shaped hotel tower.
Narration transcript
On your left is the Mirage — the resort that, more than any other, invented the Las Vegas you're driving through today. When Steve Wynn opened it in 1989, nobody had seen anything like it: a tropical resort with a volcano that erupts out front, white tigers in the lobby, dolphins out back. He built it for about six hundred and thirty million dollars, much of it raised in junk bonds, and plenty of people thought he'd lost his mind. Instead, it worked so well that every megaresort you've passed today is really a child of this one.
The Mirage was also home to Siegfried & Roy, the illusionists and their white tigers, who headlined here from 1990 onward — a run that ended in 2003, when a tiger seized Roy Horn on stage during a performance.
And now the Mirage itself is following the only law this street really obeys. It closed on the seventeenth of July, 2024, and the volcano has gone quiet — but not for long. It's being rebuilt as a Hard Rock resort, and the plan is a hotel tower shaped like an enormous guitar. The place that started the megaresort era is about to reinvent itself one more time.
Keep heading north. On your right, get ready for two things at once: a row of Venetian canals — yes, with actual gondolas — and rising right behind them, a gigantic glowing sphere, the newest and strangest landmark on the whole Boulevard.