New Mexico also has a city named Las Vegas, though what happens there really stays there — unless you also type “NM” into your “Las Vegas” Google search.
This northern New Mexico hamlet — situated between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains — is home to several historic hotels, a museum and an airport of its own, and about 13,000 other people who call themselves Las Vegans.
One thing Las Vegas, NM does not have is the welcome sign that’s been plastered across social media for the past few years. That was somebody’s idea of an AI-rendered joke.
“OMG…is this real?” asked a user of one of several Las Vegas, Nev. Facebook groups on November 29, 2025.
“I have seen that sign and it’s real,” confirmed another member of the group.
Viva Las Other Vegas
The last thing New Mexican Las Vegans find funny are jokes about being confused with the “real” Las Vegas.
For 80 years, they’ve had to put up with jabs about which casino they live near and the common misdelivery of items they order from the internet.
By the way, did you read the A.I.-rendered sign illustrating this story carefully enough to notice that it actually begins: “Welcome to Welcome…”? (Human jobs are still safe … at least for a few more weeks.)
Original Sin City
The subject is particularly sore because New Mexico’s Las Vegas used to be the real one … from its 1835 founding as a major stop on the Santa Fe Trail … through the arrival of its railroad 26 years before Nevada’s Las Vegas got the one that made it a teeny town … all the way up to 1945.
That’s when the Hoover Dam-sparked expansion of Nevada’s Las Vegas met up with the contraction of New Mexico’s due to the 1908 Belen Cutoff diversion of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad around the old northern route through the town.
The population of Las Vegas, NM hasn’t increased since.
New Mexico’s Sin City was also first to serve as a world-famous haven for criminal activity. In 1879, gunslinger Doc Holliday owned a saloon adjacent to the brothels on Center Street, and outlaw Jesse James rolled through town twice.
During one of these visits, James allegedly met Billy the Kid at a defunct hotel called the Old Adobe. (James considered relocating his train-robbing operation to New Mexico from Missouri, but it never happened.)
Las Vegas, NM even has its own connections to pop culture and the casino industry.
Its Strip, Grand Avenue, gave birth to the Maloof dynasty that founded Las Vegas, Nev.’s Palms casino hotel in 2001.
Early last century, Joseph George Maloof opened a general store there after resettling there from Lebanon. The money earned from this store led to a Pabst beer distributorship, which led to a Coors distributorship, both in New Mexico, which eventually led to the Sacramento Kings and “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
When Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda got arrested for “parading without a permit” in 1969’s “Easy Rider,” it was filmed on Bridge Street. More recently, the Coen brothers shot 2007’s “No Country for Old Men” almost entirely around town.
And stars didn’t always leave after their films wrapped. Patrick Swayze fell so in love with the city while making 1984’s “Red Dawn,” he bought a 7,000-acre ranch about 15 miles north of town. (His ashes were reportedly scattered there after he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer in 2009.)
The late Val Kilmer also lived on a ranch about 25 miles west of town from the 1990s until he sold it in 2011.
But if all this doesn’t make you reconsider Las Vegas, NM as worthy of more than overlooking or mocking, consider this…
Everyone who visits this Las Vegas at least gets to leave with their shirt.
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