Atlantis The Royal

Kohn Pedersen Fox built Atlantis The Royal from offset blocks, stacked 43 storeys high, and left the gaps for the resort to fill. Twenty sky terraces and fourteen sky courts carry pools and gardens up through the building, with the wind off the Gulf passing between the blocks. At the 22nd floor a bridge joins two of the six towers and carries Cloud 22, a 90-metre infinity pool with a swim-up bar. Palmscape rooms look back across the island to the skyline, Seascape rooms out over the open Gulf: the view Dubai built, or the one it started with. Indoors, a tank more than six metres tall holds 4,000 moon jellyfish, which have nowhere to be.

Recommended for families who want a waterpark and a serious dinner in the same day, and for couples content to keep to the grown-up corners of a resort of 795 rooms. Every stay comes with daily entry to Aquaventure Waterpark and The Lost Chambers Aquarium, a few minutes' walk away, so the slides can have the afternoon. Dinner by Heston Blumenthal can have the night: the kids club, also included, keeps its evening session going until ten, or eleven on Fridays and Saturdays. It takes everyone from under-fours, who bring a parent, to teenagers, who get a lounge of their own. The adults have two pools to themselves, Cloud 22 and the one at Nobu by the Beach, the first Nobu on any beach. Out on the terrace, the Skyblaze fountain sends up fire and water to music every fifteen minutes, for anyone who found the jellyfish too restful.