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Mecca
Islam's holiest city, home of the Kaaba and the destination of the Hajj
Five times a day, Muslims around the world turn to face a single point on Earth: the Kaaba, a cube-shaped stone building draped in black and gold cloth at the center of Mecca's Grand Mosque. Muslims regard it as the House of God, first raised by Abraham and his son Ishmael, and revere Mecca as the city where the Prophet Muhammad was born and, around 610, received the first revelations of the Quran. Every Muslim who is physically and financially able is obliged to make the Hajj pilgrimage here at least once in a lifetime, and millions more come throughout the year for the lesser pilgrimage, the Umrah. Under Saudi law, non-Muslims may not enter the city.
Mecca lies in a narrow, rocky valley among the Sarawat Mountains of western Saudi Arabia, about 70 kilometers inland from the Red Sea port of Jeddah. The Masjid al-Haram, the Grand Mosque, has been expanded repeatedly since the 1950s into a vast complex of marble courtyards, minarets, and multistory prayer halls wrapped around the Kaaba, which stands about 13 meters tall. Within the mosque are the Black Stone set in the Kaaba's eastern corner, the Station of Abraham, the Zamzam well, and the long covered gallery between the low hills of Safa and Marwa. Just south rises the Abraj Al Bait complex, whose clock tower reaches 601 meters. Beyond the city, the rites of the Hajj unfold across the tent city of Mina, Muzdalifah, and the plain of Arafat.
Before Islam, Mecca was a trading and pilgrimage town ruled by the Quraysh tribe. Muhammad's preaching there met fierce resistance, and in 622 he and his followers migrated to Medina, the event that begins the Islamic calendar. He returned in 630, and the Kaaba became the focus of Muslim worship. Umayyads, Abbasids, Mamluks, and Ottomans later ruled the city through local sharifs, and since 1924 it has been held by the House of Saud, whose king carries the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Saudi statistics counted 1,673,230 Hajj pilgrims in 2025 and 1,707,301 in 2026, about nine in ten from abroad, plus more than 18 million foreign Umrah performers in 2025. Summer heat, crowd safety, and the loss of historic buildings to new construction are the city's enduring concerns.