Jerry FiveHotel Index

Category 04 of 04

Ice Hotels

The hotel in Swedish Lapland that is carved again from river ice each winter.

Icehotel

Every spring, the rooms melt. Icehotel stands in Jukkasjärvi, a village in Swedish Lapland roughly 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, and it has been rebuilt each winter since around 1990 from ice cut out of the Torne River.

Artists apply each year to design its art suites, so no two seasons look the same. Beds are blocks of ice laid with reindeer hides, and guests sleep in thermal bags at a few degrees below zero.

Since 2016 a permanent building, Icehotel 365, has kept a set of suites frozen all year with solar-powered cooling. Heated rooms nearby let guests spend one night on ice and the rest somewhere warm.

  • Jukkasjärvi
  • Swedish Lapland
  • Rebuilt each winter
  • Icehotel 365