Do you get tired when walking around your local mall? Today at work they were talking about giant malls and I decided to check it out. It seems that the largest will be in Northwest Tehran and called the Iran Mall. It will have 21 million leasable square feet and even has a sports complex on the roof, including cycling, hiking, tennis courts, swimming pool, and ice rink.
The South China Mall in Dongguan, China comes in number two with an area of 7.2 million square feet. The mall has seven zones modeled on international cities, nations, and regions, including Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt, the Caribbean, and California. There is an 82-foot replica of the Arc de Triomphe (one of the most famous monuments in Paris, France, a replica of Venice’s St Mark’s bell tower, and even a canal with gondolas.
At 7 million square feet of leasable space is the Mall of Istanbul in Turkey. It has several performance centers, a gourmet center, and an extensive shopping center. It is also home to Turkey’s biggest cinema center with 12 theaters and 3,050 seating capacity.
China is again at number 4 and 5 with SM City Tianjin and Golden Resources Mall at 6 million-ish square feet and has more than 230 escalators. CentralPlaza WestGate in Thailand’s Nonthaburi Province comes in #6 with 5.9 million square feet. At #7 is CentralWorld in Bangkok.
The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota is right in there at 5.6 million square feet. In 1992, when it opened it was the 7th largest Mall in the world. Canada’s largest Mall comes in at 5.3 million square feet. The West Edmonton Mall, in some rankings, is the largest Mall in the Americas.
The ranking comes out in a different order according to what people choose to rank the mall sizes with. I chose leasable square feet for this post. This photo is of the Dubai Aquarium, one of the largest tanks in the world at 51m x 20m x 11m and featuring the world’s largest viewing panel at 32.8m wide and 8.3m high.
