Ice Hotels

The original, and still the reference point. Each winter, ice is harvested from the Torne river in blocks, stored through the summer, and then used with snice — a snow-and-air mixture sprayed over steel arch forms — to build a new hotel at Jukkasjärvi, two hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle. Artists from around the world are commissioned to carve the art suites, so the building is a different work every season, and in spring it returns to the river.

Alongside the seasonal structure sits Icehotel 365, a year-round building kept frozen by solar power through the midnight-sun summer, with permanent art suites and an ice bar. Practically, guests usually take one night in a cold room on a reindeer hide in an expedition-grade sleeping bag, then move to warm accommodation for the rest of the stay. There is a sauna, hot drinks at the handover, and staff who are entirely unromantic about how cold minus five feels at three in the morning.

North America's ice hotel is rebuilt from scratch each winter beside the Valcartier resort, a short drive from Quebec City. Compacted snow is sprayed over steel arches to form vaults, ice blocks are set as windows, columns and furniture, and sculptors work through the build to give the season its theme — which is genuinely new every year, not a repeated plan with new decoration.

The visit is well engineered. There is a chapel that hosts real weddings, an ice bar, an ice slide, and outdoor spas and saunas that do most of the work of making a cold night survivable. Guests are briefed, issued sleeping bags rated for the conditions, and given access to a warm building for changing and storing luggage. The neighbouring resort provides conventional hotel rooms, and most people book both: one night in the ice, the rest indoors.

The site near Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland runs two kinds of accommodation on one plot. The snow hotel is the seasonal half: snow-vaulted corridors, ice-carved rooms kept a few degrees below freezing, an ice bar and an ice restaurant, rebuilt each winter. The glass igloos are the permanent half — heated, insulated cabins with transparent roofs, built so that you can lie in bed and watch the sky without dressing for minus twenty.

That combination is the property's whole argument, and it is a sound one. Guests commonly take one night in the snow and one under glass, with a sauna and outdoor hot tubs between the two. Aurora activity is a matter of weather and solar luck and no operator can promise it, which this one is reasonably straightforward about. The surrounding forest is used for the usual Lapland programme of husky, reindeer and snowmobile excursions.

Kirkenes sits in Norway's far north-east, close to the Russian border and well inside the Arctic Circle. The snow hotel there is unusual in the category because it is refrigerated rather than purely seasonal: the snow-built corridors and ice-carved rooms are kept frozen through the year, so guests can sleep in a snow suite in July if they want to, with sculptors recarving the interiors annually.

Warm accommodation on the same site takes the form of small timber gamme cabins, each with a stove and a proper bed, which is what most people actually sleep in for more than one night. The property runs a husky kennel and king crab excursions, and in winter the surrounding darkness is deep enough to make aurora watching a reasonable expectation rather than a gamble. Staff hand out thermal suits at the door and mean it.