Ice Hotels

Ice harvested from the Torne in spring is stored through the summer and used to build a new hotel each winter, with art suites designed by a different set of invited artists every season — carved, lit and furnished individually, so the building is effectively a group exhibition you sleep inside. Alongside it, Icehotel 365 stays open all year, cooled by solar power in the Swedish summer, which is a genuinely strange and clever piece of engineering.

As a hotel it is more capable than its reputation suggests. Warm chalets and rooms provide the base accommodation, there is a proper restaurant working with northern Swedish produce, and the sauna and hot-drink routine around a cold night is well drilled. The village of Jukkasjärvi is small; Kiruna and its airport are close, which makes reaching it easier than the latitude implies.

The surrounding programme — dog sledding, river trips, guided aurora nights — is a substantial part of what guests actually do. If the northern lights are the reason for the trip, treat them as weather rather than an amenity, and give yourself several nights.

Built from many thousands of tonnes of snow and ice, the hotel is redesigned annually around a chosen theme, so the vaulted corridors, the chapel and the carved suites differ completely from one winter to the next. Several suites include a fireplace and a private hot tub in an adjoining heated space, a pragmatic combination that makes a cold night far more approachable for first-timers.

It operates as part of a larger year-round resort, which is the reason it works so well as a hotel: heated rooms, restaurants, a spa and the full outdoor programme are all on site, so the ice building can be one night in a stay rather than the entire proposition. Day visitors tour the hotel during the afternoon and leave before guests take over in the evening, which gives the corridors a distinctly different atmosphere after dark.

Quebec City is a short drive away and pairs naturally with it, particularly during the winter carnival. The season is short and dates are tightly limited by the weather, so bookings need to be made well ahead and treated as subject to the cold arriving on time.

Kirkenes sits at the far north-eastern corner of Norway, close to the Russian border and well inside the Arctic Circle, and the hotel makes full use of that position. The snow hotel is carved fresh each winter with themed rooms; the warm accommodation is a line of timber cabins with glass fronts angled at the fjord, designed so you can watch for the aurora without leaving the bed.

The site keeps a working husky kennel and a herd of reindeer, and the activity programme — sledding, king crab safaris on the ice, snowmobiling — is more central to a stay here than at most ice hotels. The restaurant leans heavily and successfully on what comes out of the Barents Sea, and the crab in particular is a reason to eat in.

Winter days are extremely short this far north, which is worth planning around; in summer the snow hotel is gone entirely and the cabins operate under a sun that does not set. It suits travellers who want the cold room as part of an Arctic trip with real content rather than as a single photogenic night.

The snow hotel is rebuilt each winter with carved rooms and an ice bar, and the site's real signature is the snow sauna — heat and ice arranged next to each other in a way that is entirely logical in Finland and slightly astonishing everywhere else. The rhythm of sauna, cold, and a warm drink is the routine the whole place is organised around.

Glass igloos provide the heated alternative, each with a transparent roof over the bed, private facilities and heating that keeps the glass clear in hard frost — the practical way to spend several nights on site without spending them all below zero. Cottages are also available for families or longer stays, and the restaurant serves Lappish cooking rather than international hotel food.

It is a short drive from Rovaniemi and its airport, which makes it one of the easier Arctic hotels to reach, and the surrounding forest is quiet enough that aurora watching does not require going anywhere. As always in Lapland, clear skies are luck; the sauna is not.