OLD VEGAS

EAT

Start your gritty, Old Vegas experience by gambling with your life at the Heart Attack Grill on Fremont Street. The hospital-themed diner offers super-high calorie items such as “bypass” burgers with up to 8,000 calories. Enjoy more elegant, old-school dining nearby at historic Top of Binion’s Steakhouse or swank Hugo’s Cellar, both located in casinos.

STAY

Once owned by mobsters including Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, the El Cortez Hotel & Casino is vintage Vegas — its exterior hasn’t changed since 1952 and it’s on the National Register of Historic Places. The Golden Nugget, meanwhile, combines classic Vegas chic with some over-thetop Strip-style sophistication, as evidenced by The Tank — a lagoon-like pool surrounding a three-storey shark tank that you can blast through on a waterslide.

PLAY

The Fremont Street Experience, a canopied, five-block, pedestrian-only stretch of neon-sign-fronted casinos, restaurants and hotels (including all the above), is the centre of Old Vegas action. The area is also home to the city’s oldest gambling establishment, the Golden Gate Hotel & Casino, and

hosts regular free concerts and nightly light shows, which appear on a 457-metre-long by 27-metre-wide video screen, the world’s largest. Explore more of Vegas’s past steps away at the excellent Neon Museum ( LEFT) and Mob Museum.