The world’s largest indoor wave pool and lake, with a full-size Santa María in it
Put aside what you think about shopping centres for a minute, because the superlatives here are real. It opened on 15 September 1981 and was built out in four goes, finishing in 1999, and it covers 490,000 square metres, 5.3 million square feet, which makes it the second largest mall in North America by floor area and the one with the most stores in the western hemisphere, over 800 of them. Inside are the WORLD’S LARGEST INDOOR WAVE POOL, throwing waves up to two metres, and the world’s largest indoor lake, with a full-size replica of Columbus’s Santa María floating in it, plus an NHL-sized ice rink. About 32 million people come through in a year, between 90,000 and 200,000 on any given day. It is a genuinely strange and genuinely impressive thing to have built on the prairie, and on a January afternoon at minus thirty it makes complete sense.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
