The Sahara Hotel and Casino is a closed hotel casino located on the Las Vegas Strip in Winchester, Nevada. It was in operation for 59 years from 1952 to 2011. The hotel had 1,720 guestrooms and suites with a casino covering more than 85,000 sq ft (7,900 m²), and sits on 55 acres (22 ha) including the empty adjoining land. The hotel is the northernmost stop for the Las Vegas Monorail. The Sahara was the last remaining vintage "Rat Pack" casino-hotel, and anchored the northern end of the Las Vegas Strip. The porte-cochere entrance, topped by an onion-dome minaret, is designed to set the resort's warm Moroccan flavor and hospitality for arriving guests.

The Sahara is owned by SBE Entertainment and Stockbridge Real Estate, who plan to reopen it in 2014 after a $744 million renovation as SLS Las Vegas, part of SBE's chain of SLS hotels.

The hotel was opened in 1952 by Milton Prell just outside of the City of Las Vegas, and was the sixth resort to open on the Strip. The resort was built by Del Webb.

The Sahara (Arabic: الصحراء الكبرى‎, Aṣ-Ṣaḥrā´ al-Kubrā, "The Great Desert") is the world's largest hot desert and second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over 9,400,000 square kilometres (3,600,000 sq mi), it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as China or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean. To the south, it is delimited by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna that composes the northern region of central and western Sub-Saharan Africa.

Some of the sand dunes can reach 180 metres (590 ft) in height. The name comes from the Arabic word for desert: (صَحراء ṣaḥrāʾ [sˤɑħrɑːʔ] ( listen)).

The Sahara's boundaries are the Atlantic Ocean on the west, the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea on the north, the Red Sea on the east, and the Sudan (region) and the valley of the Niger River on the south. The Sahara is divided into western Sahara, the central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Air Mountains (a region of desert mountains and high plateaus), Ténéré desert and the Libyan desert (the most arid region). The highest peak in the Sahara is Emi Koussi (3,415 m/11,204 ft) in the Tibesti Mountains in northern Chad.

The Las Vegas Monorail (formerly MGM Grand-Bally's Monorail) is a 3.9-mile (6.3 km) monorail mass transit system located on the Las Vegas Strip, in Clark County, Nevada, United States. It connects the unincorporated communities of Paradise and Winchester, and does not actually enter the City of Las Vegas. It is owned and operated by the Las Vegas Monorail Company. For tax purposes, the Monorail is registered as a not-for-profit corporation, which is allowed under Nevada law since the Monorail provides a public service. The state of Nevada assisted in bond financing, but otherwise no public money was used in construction; citizens may eventually have to pay taxes that fund the monorail.

The Las Vegas Monorail project was built by Bombardier Transportation upon an existing free monorail that ran between the MGM Grand and Bally's, closing a long gap in the Strip that tourists usually had to travel on foot.

After many delays, the finished Las Vegas Monorail opened to the public on July 15, 2004 with the completion and testing of "Phase 1."