Lake Havasu City, Arizona Has the London Bridge. Here’s Why That’s More Interesting Than It Sounds

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Lake Havasu City, Arizona purchased the original London Bridge in 1968 for $2.46 million, dismantled it stone by stone, shipped it to Arizona, and rebuilt it over a man-made channel cut from Lake Havasu. The bridge — built in 1831, replaced in London in 1968 because it was slowly sinking into the Thames — now sits in the Mohave Desert connecting a peninsula to the Arizona mainland, surrounded by a faux-English village of shops and restaurants. It is, objectively, one of the stranger things in America. And it works.

The London Bridge in the Mohave Desert — and the City That Built Itself Around It

Robert McCulloch, the chainsaw manufacturer who purchased Lake Havasu City’s land from the state of Arizona in 1963, bought the London Bridge as a marketing stunt to attract buyers to his planned city in the desert. The stunt worked: Lake Havasu City grew from nothing in 1963 to 60,000 people today. The bridge is the tourist anchor, but the city grew because of the lake — Lake Havasu, a reservoir of the Colorado River, provides 45 miles of shoreline and warm water recreation that draws Phoenix residents for weekends and spring breakers for chaos every March.

What Lake Havasu City Actually Is

• A legitimate recreational boating and water sports destination — the lake is wide, warm, and beautiful against the red-rock desert context
• One of the most visited spring break destinations in the Southwest, with a party culture that peaks in March and recedes the rest of the year
• An access point for the Havasu National Wildlife Refuge and the Bill Williams River — genuine wildlife areas along the Colorado River corridor
• A gateway to Havasu Falls, the turquoise waterfall on the Havasupai reservation — the most photographed waterfall in Arizona, requiring a permit that sells out instantly

Lake Havasu City is not for everyone. In summer, it regularly reaches 115°F. The spring break period is exactly what it sounds like. But in November through February, when the temperatures drop to 60–70°F and the crowds thin to almost nothing, the lake is one of the most beautiful desert reservoir landscapes in the Southwest. The London Bridge, in that context — granite blocks from the 1831 original, arching over blue Colorado River water in the Mohave Desert — is genuinely surreal in the way that only real things can be.