The world’s largest hotel – which would boast a colossal 10,000 rooms – could open in Mecca as early as next year. Abraj Kudai, to be built a mile south of the world's largest mosque and Islam's most sacred site, the Masjid al-Haram, is modelled on a “traditional desert fortress”, though that vision looks to have been distorted if the architect renderings are anything to go by.

The giant hotel - and its helipads

It will feature luxury rooms for wealthy pilgrims, a wing for the Saudi royal family, shopping malls, more restaurants than you could visit in a month, and a lavish ballroom. Here are a few more statistics about the building:

Abraj Kudai in numbers



10,000

The total number of rooms

12

Towers, 10 of which will feature four-star accommodation, the remaining two will be for five-star guests.

45

The largest towers will contain 45 storeys, the shortest will have 30.

5

The number of floors that will be reserved solely for the use of the Saudi royal family

4

It will feature at least four helipads, if the computer-generated images are to be trusted

70

Restaurants for guests to choose from

$3.5bn

The cost to build (equivalent to £2.7bn)

64,000 m²

The footprint of the building

1,400,000 m²

The total floor area

2017

The year it hopes to welcome its first guest, though funding issues are already expected to delay it until at least 2018

2,000,000

The number of pilgrims who visit Mecca each year for the Hajj

20,000,000

The total number of people who visit the city annually

Mecca-hattan

Mecca’s building spree last year prompted Irfan Al-Alawi, director of the UK-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, to describe the city as “Mecca-hattan”.

“Everything has been swept away to make way for the incessant march of luxury hotels, which are destroying the sanctity of the place and pricing normal pilgrims out,” he told the Guardian. “These are the last days of Mecca. The pilgrimage is supposed to be a spartan, simple rite of passage, but it has turned into an experience closer to Las Vegas, which most pilgrims simply can’t afford.”

The Abraj Al-Bait Towers Credit: GETTY

The city’s loftiest skyscrapers include the seven Abraj Al-Bait Towers, one of which is the world’s third tallest building at 601 metres. It features a vast hotel, the world’s largest clock face (141ft x 141ft), a prayer room with space for 10,000 people and a five-storey shopping mall. It looms over the Masjid al-Haram (the most expensive hotel rates, with views of the Kaaba, top £4,000 a night), and occupies the former site of the Ajyad Fortress, an 18th-century Ottoman citadel that was demolished in 2002 despite international outcry.

Another major building project, also in the immediate vicinity of the Masjid al-Haram, is the Jabal Omer complex. Already under construction, it will eventually feature 37 towers, including nine in excess of 150 metres.

How the completed Jabal Omer complex will look

'Mecca has been turned into Disneyland'

In his book Mecca: The Sacred City, Ziauddin Sardar describes two different Meccas. One is a metaphysical destination: the one he had first turned to in prayer as a boy; the one beloved of all Muslims. The other is a place firmly rooted in time and space, where human nature is exhibited “in all its foibles and ferocity”.

“The Saudis have turned Mecca into Disneyland,” Sardar adds. Though the city has been remade again and again in the image of whatever power was dominant at the time, its current custodians, he argues, have done more harm than any predecessors. Having bulldozed the last of the buildings that gave Mecca any architectural distinction, they have erected “a grotesque metropolis”, an “eruption of architectural bling”.



Two million Hajj pilgrims visit Mecca each year Credit: GETTY

Other colossal hotels

The current record holder, in terms of total number of rooms, is the First World Hotel in the Genting Highlands of Malaysia. It has 7,351 - and has welcomed more than 35 million guests since 2006.

Few will be surprised to learn that Las Vegas is the spiritual home of oversized hotels. There are 32 in the city with at least 1,000 rooms. The largest in Britain is Royal National Hotel in London with 1,630 rooms.