15 · Ice Hotels
Icehotel
Jukkasjärvi, Sweden
A winter building put up again each season from ice cut out of the Torne river beside it
A bed here is a block of ice with a base of boards, reindeer hides and a sleeping bag rated for the cold. The walls are sawn ice and packed snow, and the inside stays a few degrees below freezing whatever the weather does outside. Art suites are carved anew each season.
The first ice building at Jukkasjärvi was raised in 1989, and the winter hotel has been rebuilt from the river every year since. Vaults are formed over shaped moulds and covered with a mix of snow and ice, then the moulds are taken out. Beside it stands a permanent building, cooled by solar power in summer, which keeps ice rooms open through the year. In spring the winter halls melt back into the Torne.
Jukkasjärvi is a village in Swedish Lapland, well north of the Arctic Circle and about seventeen kilometres from Kiruna. The river runs past the site and the buildings are low, so the settlement reads as a line of dark roofs on white ground. The sun stays below the horizon for part of midwinter and does not set in summer.
Last gone over · June 2026
Three distances, one hotel: none of it is a promise about a stay. We work from published sources and say so plainly; the month at the foot of the page is when we last went over them.