Icehotel rebuilds itself from Sweden's Torne River every winter — the original ice hotel

Jukkasjärvi in Swedish Lapland lived on summer rafting and fishing; once the Torne River froze, the village emptied. Local entrepreneur Yngve Bergqvist, inspired by the ice-sculpting culture he had seen in Sapporo, decided winter itself could be the attraction. In 1989 he brought Japanese ice artists to town for a workshop, and the following winter the result stood on the riverbank as ARTic Hall, a 60-square-metre igloo built purely from river ice and used as an art gallery.

The hotel was born almost by accident: when visiting guests had nowhere to sleep, Bergqvist suggested the igloo. Wrapped in reindeer pelts and sleeping bags they spent the night inside, woke up delighted, and 'almost like sleeping in a hotel' became the founding idea. From the next winter on, ARTic Hall doubled as an art space and a place to sleep, and the concept grew into a full hotel rebuilt every year from the frozen Torne.

The rebuild became the brand. Each autumn ice blocks weighing up to two tons are harvested from the river and formed into shells of snow and ice; artists from around the world are jury-selected and turn about 15 rooms and suites into original sculptures, with designers shaping the light. Guests sleep at about minus five degrees on ice beds and the hotel opens from December to April, after which the whole structure melts and returns to the river — the cycle that makes every edition unrepeatable.

By 2015 the winter hotel covered nearly 60,000 square feet with 63 rooms and hosted about 30,000 guests a season at US$275–800 a night. The idea was copied from Canada to Japan, yet Jukkasjärvi remained the original, and in 2016 it added ICEHOTEL 365 — the world's first permanent ice hotel, with about 20 rooms kept frozen year-round by solar-powered cooling.