Shopping mall in Dubai among world's most visited tourist attractions

(Photo: thedubaimall.com)

Attracting 75 million visitors a year, The Dubai Mall gets more foot traffic than the Eiffel Tower, Niagara Falls and Disney World combined, CNN reports.

Of course, The Dubai Mall is no ordinary shopping center. Billed as the world's largest (in terms of total floor space) by the Guinness World Records, this shopping complex with all accompanying facilities occupies a surface area of 1,124,000 square meters!

Opened in 2008, the mall houses 1,200 stores, an Olympic-sized ice skating rink, an aquarium, the world's largest shoe store, 14,000 parking spaces, and a Boeing 737 flight simulator.

The entire complex cost $20 billion to build. With 20,000 employees, the mall's staff is equivalent to the size of a small army.

Though the mall closes at 10pm (midnight on the weekends), in some ways it is busiest after hours, when a cleaning crew of 100 sweep, vacuum and polish the interior every night.

An even more arduous cleaning task sits just outside the malls doorstep. The Burj Khalifa Lake -- an 150m liter artificial body of water that also houses The Dubai Fountain -- requires daily maintenance, partly because the desert climate itches to contaminate it with sand. In addition to the human staff, there are underwater robotic vacuums employed to undertake the task.