There’s something fishy going on here. I’m standing in the Lost Chambers of Atlantis, staring at what, I have been gravely assured, are the submerged ruins of Plato’s ancient, doomed civilisation.

The last time I saw daylight, however, I could have sworn I was on the Palm, an island off the coast of Dubai that I don’t think Plato had heard of, being as they started building it only seven years ago. You don’t have to be a Time Team presenter to know it doesn’t quite add up.

The Lost Chambers are the star attraction of the Atlantis, a new, 1,539-room mega-resort that will open to the public on September 24. Last week, I was the first British journalist to take a look around the near-finished article, and I was gobsmacked. It’s one of the most impressive and ambitious resorts I’ve seen. It’s certainly the most ludicrous.

So ludicrous, in fact, it’s almost heroic. It takes a certain damn-the-torpedoes guts to spend £750m on a premise this self-evidently daft: the “discovery” of a 10,000-year-old civilisation that never existed, on an island that’s still being finished. But we’ll get to that in a minute. For now, the impressive stuff.

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You approach Atlantis up the “trunk” of the Palm Jumeirah, as it’s formally known. In sheer engineering terms, it’s a boggling thing. Where there was nothing but sea five years ago, they’ve built a three-mile-long island with fronds radiating from the centre. Right at the crest, in prime position, the 395ft towers of Atlantis emerge slowly through the heat haze.

From the outside, the architecture is a bit odd. It’s supposed to look “Atlantean”, which seems to mean a lot of fish motifs, but they couldn’t resist throwing in a few other elements: they’ve ended up with Peter Jackson fantasy meets arabesque meets Hilton high-rise, all painted a slightly queasy frozen-prawn pink. I’m not sure it’s what Plato had in mind.

Go in and it gets odder still. The vast lobby is dominated by Dale Chihuly’s 35ft-high glass sculpture, which looks like cascading multicoloured spaghetti. There are garish “mythical” murals, and they’ve covered a good deal of the acres of floor with a turquoise-and-yellow swirly carpet – sea and shells, I think, though it’s hard to tell.

Step off that carpet and you’re in the serene and genuinely stylish spa, or David Rockwell’s sensational bamboo and wood design for the Nobu restaurant. It’s like that all over. The avenues and halls go on and on, mid1980s Dallas styling around this corner, cutting-edge contemporary around that – the most expensive design identity crisis in history.

The food is as ambitious as the rest of it. There are 17 places to eat: Giorgio Locatelli, the best Italian chef in London, has a trattoria here, and they’ve drafted in Michel Rostang from Paris and Santi Santamaria from Spain. That’s seven Michelin stars right there.

What about the rooms? The standard ones are a good size, high-spec and pretty bland, which is something of a relief. For more drama, you can always go for the Lost Chambers suites: the bedrooms look out through huge underwater picture windows into the resort’s 11m-litre lagoon, stocked with sharks, rays,angel-fish, trevallies and more, in dense, multicoloured shoals.

Fine for romantics, as long as you don’t mind a fishy audience – though the sight of the rays gliding past is so mesmerising, you might not get round to anything energetic.

If money’s no object, you’ll want the Bridge Suite, which spans the archway between the two towers. A British family are the first bookers, paying £45,000 for three nights: for that, they get three bedrooms, four staff and a gold-leafed dining table seating 18. Not the food to go on it, though – that price is B&B.

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