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The world’s biggest hotel is on the horizon

The world’s largest hotel is on track to be built in Mecca, with the holy city fast becoming a Las Vegas for pilgrims.

The lavish Abraj Kudai will cost about $3.6 billion – with 10,000 bedrooms and 70 restaurants, plus five floors for the sole use of the Saudi royal family, The Guardian reported.

The five-star hotel is set to open in 2017 and will offer an unprecedented level of grandeur to travelers and royalty alike in the Gulf.

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Abraj Kudai

A rendering of the mega-hotel. Photo: Dar Al-Handasah

Modelled on a “traditional desert fortress” the hotel boasts 12 towers atop a 10-story podium, which contains a bus station, food courts, a shopping mall and an extravagant ballroom.

The pièce de résistance will be a dome jacked up 45 storeys into the sky above the deserts of Mecca.

“The city is turning into Mecca-hattan,” Irfan Al-Alawi, director of the UK-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, told The Guardian.

“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.”

The Foundation campaigns to try to save what little heritage is left in Saudi Arabia’s holy cities.

The Grand Mosque is now loomed over by the second tallest building in the world, the Abraj al-Bait clocktower.

Located in the Manafia district, just over a mile south of the Grand Mosque, the complex will be funded by the Saudi Ministry of Finance and designed by the Dar Al-Handasah group, a 7,000-strong global construction conglomerate that turns its hand to everything from designing cities in Kazakhstan to airports in Dubai.

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