The world’s biggest ice hotel

Staying in an ice hotel has been a bucket list item for us for a long time, and if you are reading this, it is probably on your list, too. We were lucky enough to cross it off our list at Snow Village in Kittila, Finland. It is something you do once in your life, thus you want to do it right. So we decided to share our tips for all the dreamers out there.

There are around 10 ice hotels located across various corners of the world; namely Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Alaska, Canada, Andorra, Japan. So choose according to where you plan to discover.

It is rather poetic that the entire village and all the art contained with it meltdown each April and disappear completely never to come back in the same form ever again. In a way, it reminds me of Burning Man. It is reconstructed with a different concept every November to reopen in December, just in time for Christmas. A team of builders and artists from around the world work together to build the entire hotel in only 6 weeks.

Every year, 15 million kilos of snow and 300.000 kilos of natural ice are used to build the hotel. They wait for the nearby river to freeze to get the ice blocks. Only when running water freezes, the ice is so crystal clear and solid. This ice at the ice hotel mostly used for decorative parts like furniture and sculptures. Sometimes nature likes to add its touch with trapped leaves or even fish inside the ice! For the construction of the hotel, they use natural and artificial snow. Once the walls are up the artists rush to carve and ornate. When it melts, everything goes back to nature.

The hotel is open from Dec to April. It is pretty much the same for all ice hotels. We prefer Feb and March because you get longer daylight (remember that in the north daytime can be extremely long in the summer and extremely short in the winter), and it is said that the chance to see the northern lights increases because the skies are clearer and supposedly there is more solar activity around the equinoxes.

The beds at the ice hotel are crafted of ice, unsurprisingly, but you are not sleeping on the ice itself. Inside the ice bed frames, there is a mattress similar to the one you have at home. And you are given polar sleeping bags to sleep in. They are said to keep you safe at temperatures as low as -30. Of course, that doesn’t mean a warm, cozy night’s sleep at those temperatures, it just means that you survive. But don’t worry, it never gets so cold inside the hotel anyways. Snow is actually very conductive, so even though the cold reaches as much as -20 or -30 degrees outside, the temperature inside remains a relatively toasty -5 to -1 degrees.

Still, you should not expect the comfort of your typical hotel room. If you decide that you can’t do it halfway through the night, you can always go to the couches in the warm room. That is what they are there for.

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