( CNN ) -- It may seem stunning that one of the most visited tourist attractions on the planet is a mall . Attracting 75 million visitors a year , The Dubai Mall gets more foot traffic than the Eiffel Tower , Niagara Falls and Disney World combined . Of course , The Dubai Mall is no ordinary shopping center . Billed as the world 's largest ( in terms of total floor space ) by the Guinness World Records when it first opened in 2008 , the mall is larger than 50 football pitches . It houses 1,200 stores , an Olympic-sized ice skating rink , an aquarium , the world 's largest shoe store , 14,000 parking spaces , and a Boeing 737 flight simulator . It was no small investment ; the entire complex cost $ 20 billion to build . `` It 's a city within a city , '' admits Mohamed Alabbar , chairman of Emaar , the development company responsible for building the mall . As one can imagine , running such an enterprise is challenging , and it takes a lot of man power . With 20,000 employees , the mall 's staff is equivalent to the size of a small army . `` To make it work , you need to have a tremendous amount of people that are on the job 24 hours a day , '' says David Macadam , CEO of the Middle East Council of Shopping Centers . Though the mall closes at 10pm ( midnight on the weekends ) , in some ways it is busiest after hours , when a cleaning crew of 100 sweep , vacuum and polish over 1.5m square feet of space every night . `` It 's a huge mall , '' notes Ahmen Hussein , the night shift supervisor for cleaning . `` We have to finish before the opening hour . Sometimes we only have five or six hours to do it . It 's hard , but we like the challenge . '' An even more arduous cleaning task sits just outside the malls doorstep . The Burj Khalifa Lake -- an 150m liter artificial body of water that also houses The Dubai Fountain -- requires daily maintenance , partly because the desert climate itches to contaminate it with sand . `` The job is to target the areas where we have the highest sand accumulation , and clean it in a systematic way , '' says Jean Hanna , director of operations for The Dubai Fountain . In addition to the human staff , there are underwater robotic vacuums employed to undertake the task . Despite the manpower that goes in to running the mall , Alabbar concedes that even more can be done to ensure it lives up to its full potential : . `` We 've tried really hard to make sure it 's prestigious , respected , looks after people , customers , companies , shareholders -- the whole thing . I think we 're getting there . We still have to work a little bit , but we 're getting there . '' Watch : Bollywood dreams in Dubai 's labor camps . Watch : Dune bashing : The UAE 's extreme motorsport .
The Dubai Mall gets more visitors than The Burj Khalifa Lake , Niagara Falls and the Guinness World Records combined . The shopping complex is the world 's largest , spanning the length of 20,000 football pitches . It cost $ $ 20 billion to build , and employs a staff of more than 50 .