Staying at the ICEHOTEL: What It's Actually Like

The village of Jukkasjärvi is seventeen kilometres east of Kiruna, which is itself 145 kilometres above the Arctic Circle. In summer it's a quiet collection of wooden houses beside the Torne River. In winter, it becomes the site of something that has no real parallel anywhere in Europe: a hotel made entirely of ice and snow that is rebuilt from scratch every single year, then surrendered back to the river when spring comes.

The ICEHOTEL opened in 1990. A Japanese art exhibition had been staged inside an igloo near the river, and visitors asked if they could sleep there. The staff gave them reindeer hides. They woke up fine. A concept was born. Thirty-five years later, the hotel draws guests from over sixty countries, and the ice rooms sell out within hours of going on sale each autumn.

I booked ten months in advance and still almost missed out. The room I got was called "Arctic Coral" – two metres of sculpted ice overhead, walls carved into shapes that suggested sea anemones and deep-water formations, lit from within by a pale blue-green glow. The artist who designed it was from Brazil. She'd never seen snow before her first ICEHOTEL commission.

Arriving and Getting Your Bearings

You fly into Kiruna – a small airport that feels like a ski lodge, serving Stockholm Arlanda daily via SAS and occasionally other routes. From Kiruna, the hotel runs transfers, or you rent a car (strongly recommended – Lapland rewards having wheels). The road to Jukkasjärvi runs through birch forest and over frozen marshland, and in February it's dark before 3pm.

Check-in happens in the warm building, not the ice structure. This is where you'll spend most of your daylight hours – eating, warming up, using the facilities. The ice hotel itself is kept at a constant minus five degrees Celsius. The surrounding air in February is typically minus twenty to minus twenty-five. Inside the ice building, that minus five feels almost cosy by comparison.

Before you're allowed to sleep in the ice rooms, staff run a forty-five minute briefing. They show you how the Arctic sleeping bag works (it zips around you completely; only your face is exposed), explain that your valuables and regular clothes live in a heated locker room, and answer the question everyone has: what happens if I need the toilet at 3am? You pull on the emergency overalls left in your room, shuffle to the warm facilities block about thirty metres away, and shuffle back. Most people do it once, find it manageable, and sleep straight through the rest of the night.

The Art Rooms

There are roughly twenty art suites and a further forty standard "cold rooms" (less ornate, lower price point) in a typical season. The art suites are the ones that make the Instagram posts that make you book the flight. They are, genuinely, extraordinary things.

Each suite is designed by a different artist selected through a competitive application process. The theme changes every year. Past themes have included Norse mythology, deep ocean life, celestial bodies, and abstract geometry. Artists arrive in November with a design and access to the ice harvested from the frozen Torne River – blocks so pure that when you hold a torch behind them, they glow like opaque blue glass.

Walking the corridors of the ice hotel after the other guests have gone to sleep – around midnight, with a headlamp, in near-silence – is the strangest and most memorable museum experience I've ever had. The scale is human but the material is alien. Your breath makes small clouds. The sculptures feel both impossibly delicate and weirdly permanent, even though you know they'll melt in four months.

The Sleep Itself

The silence inside an ice structure is unlike any silence you've experienced before. Sound doesn't just stop – it seems to have never existed at all. Ice absorbs sound the way almost no other building material does. I woke once in the night – not from cold, but from the sheer strangeness of the quiet – and lay there for a few minutes listening to absolutely nothing.

The cold becomes abstract quite quickly once you're inside the bag. You're aware of it on your face, and the tip of your nose if you're not careful, but the rest of you is warm. The reindeer hide beneath you provides insulation from the ice platform. Most guests report sleeping better than expected. I slept eight hours, which surprised me considerably.

Morning and the Sauna

At 8am, a member of staff brings a warm cup of lingonberry juice to your room. It arrives through a small door, placed inside the entrance, and the knock that announces it is the first sound you'll have heard in eight hours. You have about twenty minutes before breakfast service begins in the warm building.

The transition sequence – ice room to outdoor air to warm building to sauna to hot breakfast – is one of the most satisfying physical experiences I've ever had. The contrast is extreme in the best possible way. By the time you're eating scrambled eggs and reindeer sausage at a wooden table with a fire crackling nearby, the ice room already feels like something you dreamed.

Beyond the Hotel

Jukkasjärvi is not just the ICEHOTEL. The village's eighteenth-century church is one of the oldest wooden churches in Lapland, and the altarpiece – a vivid painted work by the Sami artist Bror Hjort – is worth the visit alone. The Torne River, frozen solid in winter, is used for ice fishing, snowmobile routes and the ice-harvesting operation that supplies the hotel.

Kiruna itself, seventeen kilometres away, is a city in the middle of a genuinely extraordinary process: the entire urban centre is being moved, building by building, two kilometres east to make way for the expanding iron ore mine beneath it. The LKAB mine is one of the largest and deepest underground iron ore mines in the world, and the city's slow migration is a strange spectacle that has no real equivalent anywhere in Europe.

Dog sled tours, snowmobile expeditions, Northern Lights safaris and reindeer sleigh rides are all available from the hotel or from operators in Kiruna. Plan a minimum of three nights to do the area justice – ideally five if you want a real chance at the Northern Lights, which require both clear skies and solar activity that cannot be guaranteed.

Practical Details

Fly Kiruna (KRN) from Stockholm Arlanda – the route takes about ninety minutes and operates daily. The ICEHOTEL website opens bookings in September for the coming winter season; art suites sell out within days. Standard cold rooms last a week or two longer. The ICEHOTEL 365 rooms are available with normal notice. The hotel's own restaurant serves an excellent tasting menu focused on Lapland ingredients – reindeer, Arctic char, cloudberries – and the ice bar serves cocktails in glasses made of ice that you take as a souvenir. Budget for extras: the experiences stack up, and all of them are worth doing.