Four helipads will cluster around one of the largest domes in the world, like side plates awaiting the unveiling of a momentous main course, which will be jacked up 45 storeys into the sky above the deserts of Makkah. 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. Modeled on a “traditional desert fortress”, seemingly filtered through the eyes of a Disneyland imaginer 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. “The city is turning into Makkah-hattan”, says director of the UK-based Islamic Heritage Research Foundation Irfan Al-Alawi, “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 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 clock tower, home to thousands more luxury hotel rooms, where rates can reach £4,000 a night for suites with the best views of the Ka’aba The Hotel rises 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 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.