Mecca's cultural life sits in the margins of the pilgrimage: a workshop couching gold wire onto black silk, salvaged Ottoman columns in a warehouse gallery, a museum cut into the flank of Jabal al-Nour. Entry to the city is for Muslims only.
Umm Al-Joud warehouse gallery holding fragments of the Haram's earlier lives: Ottoman marble columns, teak minbars, a silver-plated Kaaba door from 1947 and the original Zamzam well cladding, all lit like sculpture.
Around 200 craftsmen dye silk black, weave it on jacquard looms and hand-couch silver wire wrapped in gold thread into Quranic calligraphy. The finished Kiswah weighs some 670 kg and is replaced once a year.
Four exhibition floors inside the 601 m tower cover lunar astronomy, clock engineering and the mechanics of the 43 m dials, ending on the glazed deck where the whole Haram basin flattens out below you.
Samir Elabd's 1979 monument spans the western approach: a colossal white Quran resting on a rehl book-stand, carried on twin piers marking the boundary non-Muslims may not cross. Best photographed at dusk.
King Abdulaziz's 1940s summer palace, restored in coral stone and plaster, now holds pre-Islamic Arabian tools, Thamudic inscriptions, old Hajj route maps and photographs of the mosque before the expansions.
The city library stands on the site traditionally identified as the Prophet's birthplace. Inside are manuscript Qurans, Hijazi chronicles and Ottoman-era firmans; the building itself dates to a 1950s reconstruction.
An immersive multimedia museum at the base of Jabal al-Nour: projection halls, soundscapes and a life-size reconstruction of the Hira cave stage the first revelation across ten themed rooms with English audio.
The 67,000 sqm district around the museum has terraced stone plazas, a small open-air amphitheatre used for recitation and nasheed evenings, artisan kiosks and Hijazi coffee houses serving qahwa with dates.
A working neighbourhood market west of the Haram where Meccan families shop: bakhoor and oud resins sold by weight, prayer rugs, Yemeni honey, brass coffee dallah pots and tailors stitching thobes to order.
One of the last pockets of pre-boom Mecca: narrow lanes of four-storey houses with carved wooden rawasheen screens, coral-block walls and Indian and Bukharan shopfronts left by pilgrim families who settled here.
Mecca's historic burial ground on the northern slope, resting place of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid and generations of the Banu Hashim. Unmarked stone plots under bare hillside, deliberately austere after the 1925 levelling.
The city's main artery after Maghrib: date sellers stacking ajwa and sukkari by the kilo, calligraphers lettering names to order, secondhand book stalls in Urdu and Malay, and tailors working until well past midnight.