Saudi Gazette report

MAKKAH — The number of domestic pilgrims this year has reached a total of 612,953 consisting of 211,736 Saudis and 401,217 non-Saudis, according to the General Authority of Statistics (GaStat).

The authority said the Saudis consisted of 118,554 males and 93,182 females while the non-Saudis consisted of 277,123 men and 124,094 women.

According to the GaStat, the pilgrims who came from outside were 1,785,722 consisting of 931,450 men and 827,272 women.

It said out of the 2,371,675 pilgrims who performed Haj this year, as many as 85,623 of them came by land via 32,289 cars.

The authority said the number of the non-Saudi domestic and foreign pilgrims increased by about 10.5 percent and added that there were 24,043 more Arab pilgrims this year.

According to the GaStat, there were 34,140 pilgrims from the GCC countries, 395,410 from the other Arab countries, 1,049,496 from the non-Arab Asian countries, 166,083 from the non-Arab African countries, 88,601 from Europe and 24,992 from America and Australia.

According to the statistics of the last 10 years, the largest number of pilgrims came in 2012 reaching 3.1 million while the lowest was in 2016, which had 1.8 million pilgrims.