The world's largest Christian church has 7,000 individually air-conditioned seats, standing-room for 11,000 in a surrounding 3ha marble plaza, and enough room for 100,000 more – 300,000 at a squeeze – beyond that.
Yet the chances of even the 7,000 seats ever all being occupied at one time are about nil, because rather than finding this church in one of the great cities of the world, you'll discover it in a community of just 120,000 people in the middle of the jungled hills, arid plains and farmlands of Africa's Ivory Coast.
And poverty, for few homes away from this city's strange CBD have even the basics of running water and sanitation.
We're talking about Yamoussoukro, the Ivory Coast's capital, and it's unusual Roman Catholic Basilica of Our Lady of Peace.
Which is the more bizarre is a matter of conjecture. Twenty-odd years ago the country's then-President, Felix Houphouet-Boigny decided that the little village of Yamoussoukro, his birthplace, would become the country's new capital.
He enthusiastically set about the conversion, building with his own and taxpayer money, universities, hotels, an 18-hole golf course for visiting dignitaries, lush parklands, boarding schools, and eight-lane boulevards to link the lot.
Plus an airport that was the only one in Africa big enough to take the Concorde, a presidential palace with a lake stocked with scores of Sacred Caymans (crocodiles,) and the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace.
And while visitors today still land at that airport, can play 18-holes, stay and dine 5-star at the swank 15-storey Hotel President (naturally,) find themselves on boulevards to nowhere, and watch the afternoon feeding of the crocodiles at the palace, it's the Basilica they want to see.
(And amidst all else, they discover a scattering of government buildings, modern and traditional stores and businesses, and homes of the less well-off.)
Modelled largely along the lines of St Peter's in Rome that took 109 years to build, the Yamoussoukro Basilica cost USD$300m and took 1,500 largely-Ivorians just three years to construct.
President Houphouet-Boigny thought it only appropriate that Pope John Paul II officially consecrate the building, but when the Vatican learned that its African St Peter's look-alike was going to be higher than the original, it laid down two rules: one was that the dome of Yamoussoukro Basilica not be higher than St Peter's, and the other that a hospital for the poor be built near the new church.
The President concurred… but somehow, just somehow, the cross on his Basilica is 17m higher than that of St Peter's.
The Pope consecrated the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace in 1990, but today the Foundation Stone for the proposed hospital stands forlornly in an adjacent unkempt field.
And rather than put the Pope up in his Hotel President, Houphouet-Boigny built a mansion next to the Basilica that he decreed be reserved exclusively for the Pope on visits from Rome. It's been used just that once.
Amongst the many spectacular trappings of the Italian-marble Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, are 7,000sq metres of French stained-glass windows, one bearing an image of President Houphouet-Boigny and strategically placed next to another depicting Jesus and the Apostles.
Many ask: the President who died in 1993, perceiving himself as a 13th Apostle?
If you're visiting the Ivory Coast, you'll have little problem getting into a Sunday service at the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace at Yamoussoukro – fewer than 10 per cent of the city's largely struggling townspeople are Catholics.
(Off-the-beaten-track Travel company Far Horizons will include Yamoussoukro as part of an Aircruise from Khartoum to Casablanca in January 2008; phone 1800 083 141 or visit www.farhorizons.com.au for details.)
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