Mecca, officially Makkah al-Mukarramah and commonly shortened to Makkah, is a city and administrative center of the Mecca Province of Saudi Arabia, and the holiest city in Islam. It is 70 km inland from Jeddah on the Red Sea, in a narrow valley 277 m above sea level.
The city of Makkah lays at the bottom of the Hejaz Mountains on the Tihamah plain that runs on the western side of Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea.
After being a land very few was known about except the toughness of its climate, central Arabia became in the 7th century CE at the center of a major change that would impact the entire world till nowadays. Indeed in an oasis named Makkah, located on a secondary caravan trade, will witness the birth of a new religion that will count 1.5 billion people 1500 years later, Islam.