10 Outdoor Wedding Venues in Las Vegas I've Photographed

You can hold your ceremony outside in Las Vegas, and the comfortable stretch of the year runs from about October through April. The hour you start matters even more than the month you pick. The ten venues below all host outdoor ceremonies, most of them for a full guest list, and I’ve photographed at every one of them.

I’m McKenzie Stewart. I’ve photographed weddings in Las Vegas since 2009, more than 300 of them, and I live in Henderson. These ten made the list because each one has a backdrop worth standing in front of and an hour of the day when the light there is good. Some of them shade the ceremony seats and some of them don’t, and the table below says which is which. For each one I’ve said how many guests fit, what it costs, and when to start.

The Grove

The Grove gives you three outdoor ceremony sites to pick from: the Gazebo, the Almond Orchard, and the Arbor by the Water. Every package includes 30 minutes at one of them. It doesn’t publish a seated capacity for any of the three. The 200 guest figure you’ll see is the maximum for the whole property, and the indoor Grand Garden Room seats 75 to 200 for the reception, so give them your guest count and ask which of the three ceremony sites holds it.

The Almond Orchard is the one I’d pick in a warm month. Mature trees line the aisle, the chairs sit in dappled shade, and there are lace drapes and string lights strung between the trunks. Start your ceremony there in the late afternoon. The Grove is also one of the few venues here that publishes complete package prices, tax and gratuity included, on its own package pages. As of late August 2026 they ran from about $3,700 plus a $300 ceremony fee up to $16,500 to $17,500 for a Saturday Grand Garden Sunset. That same package was $12,600 on a Friday or Sunday and $9,750 Monday through Thursday, so the day of the week changes your price here more than anything else does.

Sunset Gardens

Sunset Gardens is four acres of garden on East Sunset Road, and it’s one of the most shaded ceremony sites on this list. The Garden Pavilion has a real tile roof and big trees hanging over the marble aisle, so your guests are out of the sun for the whole ceremony, and at dusk those same trees fill with thousands of string lights. The other outdoor option is the Terrace Gazebo, out in the courtyard surrounded by greenery.

Each outdoor structure pairs with an indoor reception room, and that room is what caps your guest count. The Garden Room seats 280 and the Terrace Room seats 110, and the whole property holds about 285. Prices are published too. Since January 2026 the garden ceremony packages have been published at three prices. $12,495 covers 100 guests or fewer, Sunday through Thursday only. $13,995 covers 125 or fewer on any day. $17,995 covers 175 or fewer on any day. A 7 percent service fee and a 3 percent card fee go on top of whichever one you pick.

One rule here works against the ceremony hour I’d recommend anywhere else. An evening outdoor ceremony adds $1,000, and it’s only offered Monday through Thursday. So on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday you can’t have the sunset start time at all. Book a weekday if you want the evening ceremony, or take a Saturday and hold it in daylight under those trees and that tile roof, which is shaded enough to be comfortable.

Lakeside Weddings and Events

Lakeside sits on Lake Jacqueline in the Desert Shores neighborhood on the northwest side of town. That’s a different lake from Lake Las Vegas, about 25 miles away from it, and couples mix the two up constantly. There are four ceremony gardens here: Heritage, Swan, Grand and Waterfall. Heritage Garden is the flagship, with a gazebo right at the water’s edge, a bridge over the lake, and mature trees. You walk in through a tunnel of ivy covered arches strung with lights. Those arches shade the aisle, so you can start a ceremony there earlier in the day than you could at most places on this list.

Lakeside comes closer than any other venue here to publishing a number for the ceremony site itself. Heritage Garden’s ceremony only packages are sold in guest bands of 10, 30, 50 and 100, and 225 is the maximum for the whole property. Prices are published, and they’re among the lowest here: about $899 for the smallest ceremony only package, and roughly $3,000 to $10,495 for an all inclusive ceremony and reception depending on which garden and tier you pick.

Green Valley Ranch Resort

Green Valley Ranch is one of the few places here that publishes a guest number for the ceremony site itself instead of the whole property. The Piazza Staircase in Henderson puts you at the foot of a wide outdoor staircase and holds up to 175 guests. The Garden Amphitheater, which you enter between two rows of cypress trees, takes 200 or more, and there’s a smaller, quieter space inside it called the Garden Amphitheater Vineyard for groups of 50 or fewer.

I’d book the amphitheater for those cypress trees. They run down both sides of the aisle and they’re tall enough to throw shade across the seats late in the day. The staircase doesn’t have trees over it, so if that’s the site you want, ask what the shade is like there at your ceremony hour. There are olive trees on the lawn as well, and the light coming through them around sunset is the best on that property.

The resort doesn’t publish package prices. It does publish how the pricing works: ceremony and reception events start at $195 per person, plus a site fee that depends on which space you choose. So your first call here is to ask for a quote.

Lake Las Vegas

Lake Las Vegas is one lake in Henderson with several separate businesses on it, so picking it means picking among them. The Westin has three outdoor ceremony spaces: the Andalusian Gardens with a waterfront gazebo, La Menzah Lawn, and the Lotus Court. The Hilton has the Florentine Gardens, a courtyard with arched doorways and the lake behind it. Reflection Bay Golf Club has a private white sand beach.

You can’t shortlist the lake from published information. None of the three publishes a package price. They’re food and beverage minimum properties, which means you’re billed against a minimum spend on catering and bar instead of paying a flat rental fee. None of them publishes a capacity for an individual outdoor space either, and the capacity figures published for Reflection Bay don’t agree with each other. So you have to contact all three before you can decide whether the lake belongs on your tour list. Send them the same email: here’s our date and our guest count, which of your outdoor spaces seats us, what’s the minimum spend for it, and what does that come to with service charge and tax.

The emails are worth sending, because the portrait spots here are the best of the ten. There’s a marina dock with boats moored along it, a white sand shoreline, an arched bridge across the water, and a covered arcade walkway hung with lanterns that’s shaded even at noon.

Bali Hai Golf Club

The palms at Bali Hai are tall and bare and spaced far apart in white sand, so they throw almost no shade. I photographed a ceremony on that lawn in bright afternoon sun and there was nowhere for guests to get out of it. Start your ceremony in the last hour of daylight instead. By then the sun sits low behind those palms rather than overhead, and the gold Mandalay Bay tower stands behind you.

It’s the one outdoor venue on the list that’s actually on the Strip, at the south end beside the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, and the ceremony happens out on the course grounds among palm trees, white sand dunes and greenery. Cili, the name the club books its weddings under, takes weddings of 50 to 250 guests. That range covers the whole event, not the ceremony lawn on its own. The rental fee runs $3,500 to $5,000 depending on your guest count and covers five hours of event time. Extra hours are $600 each, and a food and beverage minimum applies to every event, though the club doesn’t publish that number. The Cili dining room has retractable glass doors, and it’s also the venue’s weather backup.

Stallion Mountain by Wedgewood Weddings

Stallion Mountain has three ceremony sites and two of them are outside: the Garden, a sunny event lawn with a stone aisle leading to a wrought iron rotunda, and the covered terrace. The third is an indoor chapel on the same property, which is your rain plan. All three seat up to 250 guests, and that’s a ceremony number rather than a property maximum, which makes it the most useful capacity figure on this list.

I’d book the terrace for a September wedding, because September afternoons in Las Vegas are still in the nineties and the terrace is covered. It has bistro lights along the awning and a brick paver aisle, and your guests sit out of the sun for the whole ceremony. The fairway and the pond are right there afterward for photos at golden hour.

Wedgewood publishes its pricing in pieces rather than as one number. The four package tiers run roughly $49 to $119 per person. On top of that there’s a ceremony fee listed at $995, which includes chairs and setup, and a venue fee listed between $495 and $2,395 that moves with the day of the week and the season. A 22 percent administrative fee and tax go on the total. The published starting total is $9,109 for 50 guests.

Mount Charleston

Mount Charleston is where I’d send you if you want an outdoor wedding in summer. It’s about 45 minutes from the Strip and it runs roughly 25 degrees cooler than the valley in July. You can pull the 30 year normals for both locations yourself in NOAA’s climate normals tool. You get aspens, pines and a real forest floor.

Before you plan around it, know that Mt. Charleston Lodge burned in 2021 and is still being rebuilt, so you can’t book a wedding there. What you can book is the Retreat on Charleston Peak, a hotel in Kyle Canyon at about 6,700 feet, where the courtyard and terrace under the aspens seat up to 200 guests for a ceremony. You have to ask them for a price, because they don’t publish one. Lee Canyon, the ski area one canyon over, also hosts weddings and quotes by email. A ceremony on Forest Service land is free, with a permit required only once you hit 75 people.

Start your ceremony in the morning up there in July and August rather than in the evening. Thunderstorms build over the mountains before they build over the valley, usually in the early afternoon.

The Neon Museum

The Neon Museum rents its North Gallery, an outdoor gallery of salvaged casino signs next to the Boneyard, and it’s the one urban option on this list. The signs in the North Gallery are the unrestored ones, so nothing in your ceremony backdrop lights up. The giant Stardust letters and the Lady Luck sign are what you stand in front of, and they photograph beautifully in daylight.

It’s small, and its published numbers don’t line up until you look at what each one counts. The gallery itself is rated for 70 seated guests. The wedding package is sold for up to 50, and the museum puts out 12 benches that seat about 32 of those guests, so everybody past the 32nd either stands or sits in chairs you rent and pay to have set up. If you have 120 people, this isn’t your venue. That package was published at $2,500 for a private 60 minute window as of September 2026. A full catered event in the same gallery is a $10,000 venue fee plus a $1,500 refundable deposit.

Daytime ceremonies run September through May only, because of the heat, and there’s no added fee to bring your own photographer or officiant.

Red Rock Canyon

Red Rock isn’t a wedding venue. It’s public land 30 minutes west of town, run by the Bureau of Land Management, so a wedding there works differently from the other nine. BLM prohibits rice, birdseed, butterflies, balloons, arches, chairs and other props at its wedding sites. That means no aisle chairs and no arch, so your guests stand for the ceremony.

There are four approved ceremony sites and each one has its own guest limit, so here the number really is the ceremony site’s. The Amphitheater at the visitor center takes 200, the Red Rock Overlook and the Red Spring Platform take 50 each, and the Ash Spring foundation takes 12. The Overlook’s lot has about 25 spaces, so parking runs out well before capacity does.

In exchange for those restrictions you get scenery no other place on this list has: red sandstone walls, sagebrush, and golden grass that lights up in the last hour before sunset. Your permit doesn’t buy exclusive use, so other visitors will be around you.

The ten venues side by side

Here are all ten side by side, on the five things that narrow a list: how many guests fit, whether the ceremony seats are shaded, when to start, what it costs, and where everyone goes if the weather turns.

Venue	Guest capacity	Shade over the seats	Ceremony hour	Price band	Weather backup
The Grove	200 property maximum, no per site number published	Yes in the Almond Orchard, ask about the other two sites	Late afternoon	Published, about $3,700 to $17,500 as of August 2026	Indoor hall on site, no published rain plan
Sunset Gardens	285 property maximum, capped per site by the paired room at 280 or 110	Yes, mature trees over the seats and a tile roofed pavilion	Any daylight hour, evening adds $1,000 and is Monday to Thursday only	Published, $12,495 to $17,995 with reception, ceremony only from $395	Yes, published: the ceremony moves to the paired room’s dance floor
Lakeside Weddings and Events	225 property maximum, Heritage Garden tiers at 10, 30, 50 and 100	Yes under Heritage Garden’s ivy arches, ask about the other three	Works earlier in the day than most	Published, about $899 to $10,495	Indoor chapel and banquet room on site, no published rain plan
Green Valley Ranch Resort	Per site: 175 at the Piazza Staircase, 200 or more at the Garden Amphitheater	Yes under the amphitheater cypress, ask about the staircase	Late afternoon into sunset	Quote only, from $195 per person plus a site fee	Ballrooms on site, no published rain plan
Lake Las Vegas	Not published for any outdoor space, ask each of the three venues	Not published, ask each venue	Last two hours of light	Quote only, billed against a food and beverage minimum	Ballrooms on site, no published rain plan
Bali Hai Golf Club	50 to 250 for the whole event, no separate lawn number	None, the palms throw almost no shade	The last hour of light	$3,500 to $5,000 rental, plus a food and beverage minimum	Yes, the Cili dining room
Stallion Mountain by Wedgewood	Up to 250 for the ceremony at any of its three sites	Yes on the covered terrace, none on the Garden lawn	Any hour on the terrace outside summer, late afternoon on the lawn	From $9,109 for 50 guests	Yes, the indoor chapel
Mount Charleston	Up to 200 in the Retreat’s courtyard and terrace, 74 on Forest Service land before a permit	Yes, aspen and pine	Morning in July and August	Quote only, and no venue fee on Forest Service land, where the permit is free	Yes at the Retreat and Lee Canyon, none on Forest Service land
The Neon Museum	50 in the wedding package, 70 seated maximum in the gallery	None, it’s open air	Daytime, September through May only	$2,500 ceremony, $10,000 venue fee for a full catered event	None published
Red Rock Canyon	Per site: 200 Amphitheater, 50 Overlook, 50 Red Spring, 12 Ash Spring	None, and BLM does not allow chairs	The last hour before sunset, but the Amphitheater closes at 4:30 p.m.	BLM permit fee, quoted by category	None

What month should you get married outside in Las Vegas?

October through April is the comfortable stretch, and October is the single best month of the year for an outdoor ceremony here. The normal high is 81 degrees in October and 67 in November. March is 71 and April is 78.5. May at 88.5 and September at 94.9 both work late in the day. June, July and August run hot enough to change your plans, with normal highs of 99 to 105 and July at 104.5. A normal is the middle of the record, not the ceiling, so about half of July afternoons are hotter than that.

April is the month I’d warn you about, and the reason is wind. Spring is the windiest stretch of the year in southern Nevada, March through May, according to National Weather Service records. Everybody recommends spring for the temperature, so an April ceremony gets you out of the heat and puts you into the wind instead. If you want April anyway, build the setup for gusts: a weighted arbor instead of a light arch, a tent staked by professionals, no loose paper decor, no open flames.

What time should an outdoor ceremony start?

Start your ceremony so that it ends around sunset. That puts the whole thing in the last two hours of the day, when the sun is low, the temperature is dropping, and nobody is squinting into the light.

Here’s roughly when the sun goes down here, so you can count backward from it to a start time:

• December and January, about 4:25 to 4:50 p.m.
• March and mid September, about 6:45 p.m.
• October, about 6:00 p.m.
• June and July, about 8:00 p.m.

If you’re set on a summer date, the start time matters more than anything else you decide. The local heat advice is to keep outdoor activity out of the middle of the day and do it in the early morning or the evening instead. And when the National Weather Service issues an excessive heat warning, Clark County opens cooling stations, asking the sites that host them to stay open from about 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., which is a fair picture of the hours the county treats as the hard part of the day. A 6:30 p.m. July ceremony is a completely different event from a 2 p.m. one.

One thing to do when you tour a venue: ask to see the outdoor ceremony site at the hour you’d actually be getting married. Shade moves through the day, and the site you walk through at noon is not the site your guests will sit in at five.

There’s more on working with a summer date in my guide to a summer wedding in Las Vegas, and on picking a season in the best time of year to get married in Las Vegas.

Do you need a permit for an outdoor wedding in Las Vegas?

No, not at the private venues on this list. Two of the ten sit on public land, and those are the exceptions: Red Rock Canyon, and Forest Service land on Mount Charleston.

Red Rock Canyon requires a Special Recreation Permit from the Bureau of Land Management for every wedding, no matter how small it is. You apply no more than 180 days and no fewer than 30 days before your date, and permits are issued first come, first served, so nothing holds your site and date until yours is approved. Apply the day your 180 day window opens. BLM publishes a fee structure rather than one flat price, and which line applies depends on how they categorize your event, so call their permit office at (702) 515-5371 and ask what yours will cost.

Mount Charleston works differently, because that mountain is national forest. A wedding on Forest Service land needs a noncommercial group use permit only when your group reaches 75 people, counting everyone who’s there, and that permit is free. Under 75 people you don’t need one. What you do need is a plan for chairs, restrooms and power, because none of that exists out there.

I’ve written the full walkthrough of applications, timing and sites in my guide to Las Vegas desert wedding permits.

What to ask a venue about wind and rain

Ask every venue on your shortlist what happens when the weather turns, because almost none of them publish an answer. Sunset Gardens is the exception here: its published rain plan is to move the ceremony indoors and set it up on the dance floor of the paired banquet room. Bali Hai names the Cili dining room as its backup, and Stallion Mountain’s indoor chapel is one of its three ceremony sites. Everywhere else, you have to ask. Put these four questions in an email, so that you and the venue both have the answers in writing:

• Where exactly does my ceremony move if it rains?
• Who makes that call, and by what time of day?
• Does moving it cost anything extra?
• Is your arbor weighted or staked for wind?

Where to see more photos from these venues

Most of these places have their own page on my site, with the full set of photos I’ve taken there:

• The Grove
• Sunset Gardens
• Lakeside
• Green Valley Ranch
• Lake Las Vegas
• Bali Hai
• Stallion Mountain
• Mount Charleston
• Red Rock Canyon

Let’s talk about your date

If you’ve cut this down to two or three venues and you want to know what each one looks like on camera at the hour you’re planning, email me at mckenzie@msweddingimage.com and tell me which ones you’re considering. I’m happy to talk it through before you commit to anything, and my pricing is on the site if you’d rather look first. I hold dates for couples whose venue is already booked, since the venue is what sets the date. So once you’ve signed with one of these places, send me a note and I’ll tell you whether I’m free that day.