Canada Guide
Alberta and the Rockies
West Edmonton Mall
Opening time: Mon– Fri 10am–9pm, Sat 10am–6pm, Sun noon–6pm
Website: www.westedmall.com
"Your Adventure Awaits" announces the brochure to West Edmonton Mall, preparing you for a place that has had eleven mentions in the Guinness Book of World Records, including its main claim to fame as the largest shopping mall in the world. Built at a total cost of $1.2 billion, the complex extends over the equivalent of 115 American football fields (or 48 city blocks) and boasts more than 800 shops – of which some 110 are restaurants – plus twenty-one cinemas, and eleven department stores. There's almost a queue of superlatives. Its car park is the world's largest, with room for 20,000 cars; it has the world's largest water park (fifty million litres of water) as well as the world's largest indoor amusement park; it uses enough power to run a town of 50,000 people. The mall's effect on Edmonton has been double-edged: it employs 15,000 people but has captured thirty percent of the city's retail business, thus crippling the downtown shopping area, though it has also succeeded, to everyone's surprise, in attracting twenty million visitors a year (that's 55,000 a day).