Sixty metres of fresh water in a shed in Nad Al Sheba, with a whole abandoned town sunk into it and sorted by depth. The ATM is at three metres. The garage is at forty.

The number is 60.02 metres — 196 feet and 10 inches — certified by Guinness on 27 June 2021 and open to the public a month later. It holds fourteen million litres, about six Olympic pools’ worth, and none of it is going anywhere: no current, no surge, no visibility that changes with the season. That is the trade the whole place is built on, and it is worth being clear-eyed about. This is not the sea. It is a set.

What makes it more than a very deep tank is that somebody furnished it, and did it by depth. At three metres there is a motorbike, an ATM and a chess game. At eighteen, a basketball hoop, a foosball table and a treasure chest. At thirty you can swim through an apartment — kitchen, bedroom, music room. At forty there is a garage with cars in it and a row of arcade cabinets. Below that the streetscape gives out and the last twenty metres are for technical divers. Air-filled chambers are set into the wall at six and twenty-one metres, so you can surface inside the pool, say something out loud, and go back down.

Fifty-six cameras cover the whole volume, which sounds like surveillance and is actually the product: the footage is why the place doubles as an underwater film studio, and it is why you leave with video of yourself doing this rather than a story about it.

The honest limit is certification, and it decides what you actually get. Twelve metres is as deep as an uncertified diver goes, so the apartment and the garage — the two things everyone comes for — are out of reach unless you already dive or you take the course. Snorkelling starts at AED 400 and stays near the surface; scuba is AED 1,200, freediving AED 900, and the Sunken City Walk (helmet on, feet on the street) AED 600. There is also a full open-water course at AED 4,000 if you would rather arrive uncertified and leave otherwise.

It is a pool, and pretending otherwise would be silly. But it is the only pool on earth where the interesting question is which floor you want to get to.