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Mecca, also spelled Makkah, is a city in the Hejazi region of Saudi Arabia. 70 km inland from Jeddah, in a narrow valley 277 m above sea level, 340 kilometres south of Medina, its population in 2012 was 2 million, although visitors more than triple this number every year during the Ḥajj, held in the twelfth Muslim lunar month of Dhūl-Ḥijjah.