When you can sleep with sharks, what’s the point of swimming with them?

That is specifically what The Muraka, the first hotel villa located underwater, has to offer. The Muraka is a two-story aquarium with glass walls that is more than 16 feet below sea level in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where you can wake up to the swinging arms of coral and fall asleep to fish swimming overhead.

 

A long jetty connects the Hilton’s Conrad Maldives Rangali Island resort, known for its firsts, to the Muraka, which debuted in November 2018.

In the Maldives, “The resort was the first hotelier to perch villas on stilts above the water, the first to open an underwater restaurant, and now they are the first to sink a residence into the briny depths,” writes Melissa Locker for Architectural Digest.

The Muraka, which means “coral” in the local Dhivehi language, offers a strange experience, but it costs $50,000 each night before taxes. That’s not even close to the staggering $15 million construction cost, according to Bloomberg.

According to Architectural Digest, the 600-ton bottom level was constructed in Singapore and then transported to the Maldives on a specialized ship where it was safely sunk next to a coral reef. Ten concrete piles provide its stability in bad weather.

Watch the video below to see what lies beneath the waves.