"Underwater hotel" is a common search, but it's worth being precise about what it actually means — the vast majority of Maldives overwater accommodation sits above the lagoon on stilts (see our overwater villas guide), not below the surface. Genuine underwater bedrooms are a real but very rare category.
The Muraka
The best-known example is The Muraka, a two-storey residence at Conrad Maldives Rangali Island — the same resort behind the Ithaa undersea restaurant — with a bedroom level set below the surface, glass-walled onto the surrounding reef. It's an entirely different category from a standard overwater villa: genuinely underwater, not simply over water.
Don't confuse it with an undersea restaurant
Undersea dining rooms — Ithaa at Conrad Rangali being the best-known example in this directory — are a separate, more common concept: a restaurant below the surface, not a bedroom. See our Conrad Rangali profile for both features at the same resort.
Why it stays rare
Building and maintaining a genuine underwater guest room is a significant engineering undertaking, which is exactly why it remains a single-digit feature across the entire country rather than a standard luxury-resort amenity — most "underwater" marketing you'll encounter elsewhere actually refers to overwater villas or undersea dining.