The developers of a forthcoming luxury resort in the Maldives claim that they have finished constructing the world’s largest underwater restaurant.

The 400-ton megastructure was created over 10 months in New Zealand and Japan and has now been transported to the resort in Lhaviyani Atoll, where it is being fixed to steel piles by divers 5.8 metres below a lagoon.

Guests at the Hurawalhi Island Resort & Spa will enter the restaurant via a spiral staircase from a hut on the jetty, which will contain the kitchen. They can then dine while fish and other sealife swim around their heads and explore the coral below.

“The restaurant has taken a fair amount of ambition, optimism and dedication, and it has taken our contractor even more ingenuity to build it exactly as imagined,” said the resort's general manager Patrick de Staercke. “The result is downright sensational and will be alone worth the trip here.”

Auckland underwater specialists M.J. Murphy were commissioned to design the project following their work on the first underwater restaurant in the Maldives; a smaller structure located at the Conrad Hilton resort.

The new restaurant, which is 18m x 5m in size, was built by New Zealand firm Fitzroy Engineering and Japanese acrylic contractors Nippura, who added the 190mm thick windows. The interiors have been designed by Stuart McKechnie Architects.

The five-star Hurawalh resort – which will feature villas built on stilts over the water – is in the final stages of development and will open later this year. The project is being funded by development company Champalars Holdings Pvt.

Other underwater projects in the Maldives – which is famous for its rich and diverse underwater life – include Subsix, an underwater creative space designed by Poole Associates, and a planned multi-million dollar underwater resort called the Water Discus Hotel.