Great mosque of Algiers

The Great Mosque of Algiers (Djamaa el Djazair) is the third-largest mosque in the world after the Grand Mosque of Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, and it features the tallest mosque minaret in the world. The mosque was commissioned by the Algerian government during the presidency of Abdelaziz Bouteflika as a national religious and cultural project, with construction beginning in 2012 and completion in 2019. The minaret rises two hundred and sixty-five metres in height — the tallest minaret in the world — and contains a museum of Islamic art and culture, an observation deck and research facilities across its forty-three floors. The main prayer hall accommodates approximately thirty-seven thousand worshippers, with capacity for over one hundred thousand more across the surrounding plazas, making the total capacity comparable to the largest religious gathering spaces on earth. The mosque was designed by the German firm KSP Jürgen Engel Architekten in collaboration with the Algerian Ministry of Religious Affairs and was built by the China State Construction Engineering Corporation at a reported cost of nearly nine hundred million euros, partly financed by Chinese loans as part of the broader China–Algeria economic partnership. The complex includes a library of one million volumes, a Quranic school, a research centre, and an Islamic cultural centre, in addition to the mosque itself, making it among the largest religious-cultural complexes constructed anywhere in the modern era.