Maldives Overwater Resorts
The Maldives is where the overwater villa was perfected, a wooden deck on stilts over a shallow lagoon, with steps straight into water the colour of a swimming pool. There are more than a hundred resorts spread across the atolls, and the gap between the best and the merely expensive is wide. This ranking covers the ones worth the seaplane transfer, judged on the villa itself (its size, privacy, and how close it sits to good reef), the house reef and marine life, the food, and how well the resort respects the lagoon it is built on.
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Maldives
Soneva opened the first luxury resort in the Maldives in 1995 and still sets the standard for the overwater villa. At Soneva Jani in Noonu Atoll, the overwater villas come with a retractable roof over the bed and a slide from the deck into the lagoon, backed by one of the most serious sustainability records in the country.