Ice Hotels

The original, and still the reference point. Every winter the Icehotel is rebuilt in the village of Jukkasjärvi from snow and from ice cut out of the Torne River, and every spring what was built goes back into the river. Artists are invited to design individual art suites, so the interior changes completely from one season to the next and no two years are comparable.

Alongside the seasonal building there is now a year-round wing kept frozen by solar power through the Arctic summer, which means the hotel no longer disappears entirely in May. Warm accommodation, saunas and a restaurant sit a short walk away, because nobody spends an entire stay at minus five.

Guests sleep on ice beds under reindeer hides and thermal sleeping bags, and are briefed carefully beforehand. The briefing matters: the difference between a memorable night and a miserable one here is almost entirely procedural.

North America's ice hotel is rebuilt each winter on the outskirts of Québec City, and it leans harder into architecture than into art. Vaulted corridors, a chapel used for real weddings, an ice slide through the public rooms and a bar where everything including the glassware is frozen give it a coherent, almost civic layout.

It opens for a few weeks around the turn of the year and closes in March, and a large share of its visitors never sleep there at all — day admission is a significant part of what it does, which lends the public spaces a busier, more sociable feel than the Nordic equivalents.

Those who do stay overnight get a briefing, a sleeping bag rated for the conditions, and access to heated pavilions and outdoor spas beside the site. The theme changes annually, so the plan is redrawn rather than repeated.

Kirkenes sits on the Barents Sea near the Russian border, far enough north and east that the winter light is minimal and the aurora is a routine part of the forecast. The Snowhotel is rebuilt each December on the shore of a fjord, with carved suites off a central corridor and a restaurant serving king crab pulled from the water nearby.

What distinguishes it is how much happens outside the ice itself. There is a working husky kennel and a reindeer enclosure on site, and the animals are part of the operation rather than an excursion sold to guests. Heated glass cabins on the shoreline offer the same view for anyone who would rather not sleep at freezing point.

It is a small, remote, weather-dependent operation, and it is honest about that: plans shift with the ice and the light, and guests are told as much on arrival.

Just outside Rovaniemi, in the forest and lakeland of Finnish Lapland, this property runs two kinds of accommodation side by side. The snow hotel is carved fresh each winter — corridors, a chapel, an ice bar, sculpted rooms held a few degrees below freezing. The glass igloos are heated, permanent and glazed overhead, so the aurora can be watched from a warm bed.

Between them there is a snow sauna, an ice restaurant and the ordinary Finnish sequence of sauna, cold plunge and a long dinner, which is really the organising ritual of a stay here.

The pairing is practical rather than cynical: most guests want one night in the ice and the rest somewhere warm, and the hotel is built to let them do exactly that without leaving the site.