City
in the sky: world's biggest hotel to open in Mecca
The holy city is fast becoming a Las Vegas for pilgrims, thanks to
the new £2.3bn megahotel that has four helipads, five floors for Saudi royalty
– and 10,000 bedrooms
Desert
fortress through the eyes of a Disneyland imagineer … the 45-storey Abraj Kudai
hotel in Mecca. Click to view full image.
Photograph: Dar Al-Handasah
Four
helipads will cluster around one of the largest domes in the world, like
sideplates awaiting the unveiling of a momentous main course, which will be
jacked up 45 storeys into the sky above the deserts of Mecca. It is the
crowning feature of the holy city’s crowning glory, the superlative summit of
what will be the world’s largest hotel when it opens in 2017.
With 10,000 bedrooms and 70 restaurants, plus five floors for
the sole use of the Saudi royal family, the £2.3bn Abraj Kudai is an entire
city of five-star luxury, catering to the increasingly high expectations of
well-heeled pilgrims from the Gulf.
Modelled on a “traditional desert fortress”, seemingly filtered
through the eyes of a Disneyland imagineer with classical pretensions, the steroidal scheme comprises 12
towers teetering on top of a 10-storey podium, which houses a bus station,
shopping mall, food courts, conference centre and a lavishly appointed
ballroom.
Located in the Manafia district, just over a mile south of the
Grand Mosque, the complex is 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. For the Abraj Kudai, it has followed
the wedding-cake pastiche style of the city’s recent hotel boom: cornice is
piled upon cornice, with fluted pink pilasters framing blue-mirrored windows,
some arched with a vaguely Ottoman air. The towers seem to be packed so closely
together that guests will be able to enjoy views into each other’s rooms.
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Mecca's
mega architecture casts shadow over hajj
Read more
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“The city is turning into Mecca-hattan,” says Irfan Al-Alawi,
director of the UK-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation, which campaigns
to try to save what little heritage is left in Saudi Arabia’s holy cities.
“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 Grand Mosque is now loomed over by the second tallest
building in the world, the Abraj al-Bait clocktower,
home to thousands more luxury hotel rooms, where rates can reach £4,000 a night
for suites with the best views of the Kaaba – the black cube at the centre of
the mosque around which Muslims must walk. The hotel rises 600m (2,000ft) into
the air, projecting a dazzling green laser-show by night, on a site where an
Ottoman fortress once stood – razed for development, along with the hill on
which it sat.
The list of heritage crimes
goes on, driven by state-endorsed Wahhabism, the
hardline interpretation of Islam that perceives historical sites as encouraging
sinful idolatry – which spawned the ideology that is now driving Isis’s reign
of destruction in Syria and Iraq. In Mecca and Medina, meanwhile, anything that
relates to the prophet could be in the bulldozer’s sights. The house of
Khadijah, his first wife, was crushed to make way for public lavatories; the
house of his companion Abu Bakr is now the site of a Hilton hotel; his
grandson’s house was flattened by the king’s palace. Moments from these sites
now stands a Paris Hilton store and a gender-segregated Starbucks.
“These are the last days of Mecca,” says Alawi. “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.”
Along
the western edge of Mecca, the Jabal Omar development, which will accommodate
100,000 people. Photograph: Jabal Omar Development
The city receives around 2 million pilgrims for the annual Hajj,
but during the rest of the year more than 20 million visit the city, which has
become a popular place for weddings and conferences, bringing in annual tourism
revenue of around £6bn. The skyline bristles with cranes, summoning thickets of
hotel towers to accommodate the influx. Along the western edge of the city the Jabal Omar development now rises, a sprawling complex that will eventually accommodate
100,000 people in 26 luxury hotels – sitting on another gargantuan plinth of
4,000 shops and 500 restaurants, along with its own six-storey prayer hall.
The Grand Mosque, meanwhile, is undergoing a £40bn expansion to
double the capacity of its prayer halls – from 3 million worshippers currently
to nearly 7 million by 2040. Planned like a vast triangular slice of cake, the
extension goes so far back that most worshippers won’t even be able to see the
Kaaba.
“It is just like an airport terminal,” says Alawi. “People have
been finding they’re praying in the wrong direction because they simply don’t
know which way the mosque is any more. It has made a farce of the whole place.”
