Most hotels advertise warm rooms and cozy beds. One famous hotel in northern Sweden offers the opposite: rooms kept below freezing, beds carved from ice, and a building that disappears every spring. And people travel from all over the world to sleep there.
It's called the Icehotel, in the village of Jukkasjärvi, about 11 miles from the town of Kiruna. It first opened in 1990 and is the world's first ice hotel. Each year it's rebuilt from scratch with snow and ice taken from the nearby Torne River, and when spring arrives, the whole thing melts back into the river.
A Hotel Born by Accident
The Icehotel started almost by chance. In 1989, Japanese ice artists visited the area and created an exhibition of ice art. The next spring, French artist Jannot Derid held an exhibition inside a cylinder-shaped igloo there.
One night, there were no rooms left in town. Some visitors asked if they could spend the night in the igloo. They slept in sleeping bags on top of reindeer skins, and without realizing it, they became the hotel's very first guests.
Built Fresh Every Winter
Everything is made of ice and snow, including the chairs, the beds, and even the glasses in the bar. Inside, the temperature stays around 23 degrees Fahrenheit. That's below freezing, but much warmer than the arctic air outside. Guests stay warm in furs, blankets, and sleeping bags made for extreme cold.
Each spring, around March, the hotel harvests tons of ice from the frozen river and stores it in a production hall that holds hundreds of tons of ice and thousands of tons of snow. When the next winter comes, builders and artists get to work. Ice hotels depend on sub-freezing weather, so their seasons are short. Building one takes more labor than a regular building, but the materials are a lot cheaper.
No two years look the same. Artists submit ideas, and a jury picks about 50 of them to design the suites, the bar, the reception area, the main hall, and even a church. The Icehotel covers some 64,600 square feet and is known as the biggest hotel of ice and snow in the world.
Weddings in an Ice Church
One of the most surprising rooms is the Ice Church. It's run by the local parish of the Church of Sweden and is consecrated each year at the Christmas Day service. Each winter, around 140 couples get married there and about 20 children are baptized.
The Icehotel has also inspired a whole industry. Its first ice bar opened there in 1994. Since then, ice hotels have appeared in several other countries, including Canada, where the Hôtel de Glace near Quebec City opened in 2001.
Would You Stay the Night?
An ice hotel isn't for everyone. Prices for a night at ice hotels can range from about $300 to $3,000, and you'll be sleeping on a bed of ice. But the rewards are special. In winter, guests at Jukkasjärvi may get to see the northern lights dancing overhead.
More than a million people have visited the Icehotel since it began, though many come to look around rather than stay overnight. And there's something poetic about a hotel that returns to the river every spring, only to rise again next winter as something brand new.
