The reclamation that created Cotai was one of the most consequential land-use decisions in modern Macau's history. Where the Pearl River estuary once lapped between Coloane and Taipa, the government filled the gap and built an entirely new district. The first casino to open on this new ground was the Grand Waldo Hotel, operated by Galaxy Entertainment Group, which began operations in May 2006 — stepping onto still-settling land before most of its competitors had broken ground. The Venetian Macao followed on August 28, 2007, bringing with it a replica of St. Mark's Square, complete with singing gondoliers, rising eleven stories into the subtropical sky. It became the largest casino in the world by floor area, a distinction that says something about the sheer ambition of what Cotai was meant to be. The name came with a trademark. Adelson's company successfully registered "Cotai Strip" with the United States Patent and Trademark Office — an act of commercial confidence that attached a brand to an entire district before it had properly formed.

In mid-2008, the financial crisis reached across the Pacific and found the construction cranes on Cotai. Las Vegas Sands halted its development of Plots 5 and 6 when the project was 65% complete, abruptly ending work for up to 11,000 construction workers. The half-built towers stood exposed to the humid air for over a year while the company redirected its capital to Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. It was a brutal pause. The Macau government began speaking about diversifying Cotai away from pure gaming — a conversation that would eventually reshape the district's ambitions. Sands eventually secured $1.75 billion in November 2009 to complete the project, which opened in phases from 2012 to 2015 as Sands Cotai Central before being rebranded as The Londoner Macao in 2021. The crisis left its mark: certain plots were never developed, certain plans were quietly shelved. The Jumeirah Macau Hotel, announced in 2008 and originally scheduled to open in 2013, remained an empty site years later.

Each resort on Cotai pursued its own fantasy with the intensity of a theme park. The Parisian Macao erected a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. Studio City built the world's first figure-8 ferris wheel between its two hotel towers, boarding passengers at the 23rd floor. Wynn Palace centered its identity on a lake of dancing fountains that could be viewed from a cable car crossing overhead. MGM Cotai designed its public atrium as a vertical garden — a soaring glass-roofed space intended to evoke the natural world inside a building that otherwise excluded it entirely. City of Dreams commissioned Zaha Hadid's studio to design the Morpheus Hotel, a structure whose exoskeleton of interlocking loops became one of the most photographed buildings in modern Asia. The casinos are not directly connected to a central boulevard the way Las Vegas Strip properties share a sidewalk. Cotai's grid is wider, more spread out, each resort an island unto itself, linked by a light rail that opened on December 10, 2019.

The Macau Light Rapid Transit's Taipa section changed the rhythm of Cotai when it opened. Stations now sit at nearly every major property: Pai Kok Station serves Galaxy Macau; Cotai West Station handles the dense cluster of The Venetian, The Parisian, and The Londoner; Lotus Checkpoint Station stops at Studio City; Cotai East Station connects MGM Cotai, City of Dreams, and Wynn Palace. Before the LRT, getting between properties meant shuttles or taxis threading the peripheral road. The train made Cotai feel less like a collection of fortresses and more like a city. That civic dimension had always been the ambition — the Macau government pushed from early on for Cotai to include non-gaming elements, entertainment venues, convention centers, parks. Galaxy Macau's Phase 3 expansion added a 16,000-seat arena and 40,000 square meters of conference space. The district that started as pure gambling ambition had become something more complicated and more durable.

Cotai's history is measured in renamings. Sands Cotai Central became The Londoner Macao. The Four Seasons tower added the Grand Suites brand. Lisboeta Macau opened on land that had been debated and deferred for over a decade, built by Macau Theme Park and Resort Ltd with a Macau-heritage theme that deliberately looked away from the imported fantasies of its neighbors. The strip has now survived a financial crisis, a pandemic, a gaming-license restructuring, and multiple rounds of construction. What it built on reclaimed land is itself a kind of reclamation — a geography assembled from ambition, debt, and an extraordinary amount of sand.