The original, biggest and probably coolest of them all. In Jukkasjärvi, the ICEHOTEL’s innovative approach has been encouraging visitors to embrace the cold for more than 30 years. And its latest idea now means you can sleep in an ice-made room any time and any day of the year. Kept cold by a refrigeration unit, ICEHOTEL 365 offers the best of both worlds. Enjoy summer activities in the Arctic Circle by day and escape to your own winter wonderland by night.
For a more traditional experience, stay in the original hotel, which melts and is rebuilt by ice sculptors from all over the world every year. No two designs are the same in the bedrooms, where you can drift off to sleep on a bed made entirely of ice. But don’t worry about getting frostbite: there are cosy thermal sleeping bags and reindeer hides to keep you warm.
For the ICEHOTEL's 33rd edition, guests will be able to sleep in an ice dome, a Japanese garden, under giant mushrooms, and much more. There is also a brand new ceremony hall used for intimate celebrations, designed by Wouter Biegelaar, Netherlands, and Viktor Tsarski from Bulgaria.
It took six weeks to construct the hotel, and is minus five degrees Celsius inside. Make sure you visit before the hotel melts back into the Torne River in spring!
During your stay you can also enjoy outdoor activities, drinks in Ice Bar, and a look around fantastic art exhibitions. The ICEHOTEL is also within easy reach of Abisko – one of the best places in the world to see the northern lights
Take a cable car deep into the Fagaras Mountains to reach this secret ice-built retreat, and choose between a double room for two people or an igloo. Both are made with ice from the largest glacial lake in the mountains, decorated with hand-sculpted furniture and come with animal fur, blankets and pillows.
Even the plates in the restaurant are made from ice, and there is also a church for couples who want to tie the knot. The nearby medieval towns of Brasov and Sibiu are worth exploring, with their beautiful cobbled streets and resplendent architecture.
Between mid-January and the end of February each year, visitors to the Hoshino Resorts Tomamu in Hokkaido may be lucky enough to spend a night in the Ice Hotel. The sub-zero dome is just eight metres wide and four metres high, so there’s only space for one room. Guests are given a shruff (sleeping bag) to keep cosy at night, and a bowl of soup for breakfast.
But staying here is by no means a remote experience. The hotel is part of a larger winter world – the ice village. Here you can watch weddings in the ice church, eat cheese fondue in the frozen café, whizz down the ice-carved slide, skate on the ice rink and curl up by the fire in the library.
Set up by an extreme snowboarder who wanted to be the first person to ride the soft powder in the morning, Iglu-Dorf now has igloo villages in several locations, most of which are in Switzerland. At the Zermatt village you can lie in a whirlpool and gaze at the Matterhorn, while at Zugspitze you can look down on Germany, Austria and Switzerland from one viewpoint. The freshest one of the lot is in Innsbruck, Austria, which can be reached on skis and snowboards. At over 2,600 metres above sea level, there is even a ‘thrill walk’ to the igloo restaurant.
The igloo villages are rebuilt every year, and decorated by international artists, creating magical new worlds made of snow and ice.