Widely called the largest mosque in Latin America, this one stands on land given by the president of Argentina.
This is the King Fahd Islamic Cultural Center, in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. People also call it the Mosque of Palermo.
In 1995, after a state visit to Saudi Arabia, President Carlos Menem granted about 34,000 square metres of city land here. The mosque was inaugurated in 2000, as a gift from the Saudi government, and it is named after King Fahd.
The architect was Zuhair Fayez. The building has two minarets, and its prayer halls hold about 1,200 men and 400 women. The city’s tourism office gives somewhat higher numbers, 1,500 and 500.
Beyond the prayer halls, the complex has a library, an exhibition hall, an auditorium, classrooms, a school, and a dormitory for fifty students. Its Arabic classes are free and open to the public.
The building is sand-coloured, with tall pointed arches in bands of terracotta and cream. Black geometric ironwork screens the windows, and the courtyard is paved in pale stone with red stripes.
The title of largest in Latin America is widely repeated rather than measured, and a 2000 Argentine newspaper headline gave a narrower claim, the biggest in South America.
