Category
Buildings that exist for one season. Rebuilt annually from river ice and snow, then allowed to melt — four of the places that keep doing it.
An ice hotel is a building with a deadline. It is cut, carved and assembled in early winter, occupied for a few months, and then returns to the river or the ground it came from.
Four of them are listed below — the Swedish original, its Québec counterpart, a Norwegian snow hotel on the Barents coast, and the Finnish snow complex at Kemi.
Jukkasjärvi, Lapland, Sweden
The original, rebuilt each winter from ice harvested out of the Torne River and allowed to melt back into it in spring. Artists are invited annually to carve the suites, so the building is a different work every year and exists only in photographs afterwards.
A year-round wing kept cold by solar-powered cooling has since been added, alongside warm accommodation for guests who want the rooms without the overnight temperature.
Saint-Gabriel-de-Valcartier, Québec, Canada
North America's ice hotel, raised each January in the Valcartier valley outside Québec City from snow and ice, then dismantled by spring. Interior temperatures hold a few degrees below freezing regardless of the weather outside.
The chapel and the ice slide running through the lobby draw day visitors, while overnight guests are briefed on thermal sleeping bags and the practicalities of a night at minus five.
Kirkenes, Finnmark, Norway
Far above the Arctic Circle near the Russian border, the snow hotel is rebuilt each December with carved rooms and an ice bar, and stands alongside a set of heated cabins on the fjord.
The site keeps a working husky yard and a reindeer herd, and the aurora season overlaps neatly with the months the snow building is open.
Kemi, Lapland, Finland
Part of the SnowCastle built each winter on the shore of the Gulf of Bothnia — a complex that includes a restaurant, a chapel and the snow hotel itself, with the whole structure redesigned to a new plan every season.
Kemi also keeps a glass villa village and a working icebreaker on the same waterfront, so the snow rooms sit inside a wider winter itinerary rather than standing alone.