Ice Accommodations

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The Ice Hotel

Accommodations in one of the coldest parts of Sweden offer a frozen place to rest your head.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

BERGQVIST, WHO HAD SPENT YEARS IN JUKKASJARVI (pronounced YUK-kas-yair-vey) working as a river rafting guide and advising a local mining company on environmental practices, started plotting how to lure tourists to his adopted home two decades ago. He called up the tourist chief in Kiruna, a larger town 12 miles away, to see what advice he might have for such a project.

"Nothing," he recalls the tourist chief replying.

"Give me advice!" Bergqvist pressed him.

"Close up," the official retorted. "Everybody knows that place is koldhala" -- a Swedish word that means, roughly, "a cold spot where nobody wants to go."

While another man might have given up at that moment, Bergqvist was undaunted. He did what any savvy entrepreneur would do: He looked overseas to see how other chilly towns attracted visitors. In 1989, he attended the Hokkaido winter festival and watched as 35 jumbo jets ferried in tourists from Tokyo to gaze at ice sculptures. The next year, he invited Japanese artists to Jukkasjarvi for a workshop, where they transformed ice taken from the sparkling Torne River into art. Over time, Bergqvist and his colleagues perfected the art of making an Antonio Gaudi-inspired igloo, cutting more than a thousand blocks of crystal-clear ice from the river with industrial saws while spraying a mixture of wet snow he has dubbed "snice" onto massive metal forms. By the winter of 1992-93, people started paying to sleep in his well-appointed igloo. Fifteen years later, the Ice Hotel has become a destination of a lifetime.

SO MUCH OF A DESTINATION, in fact, that it comes complete with evening entertainment. The modern-day teepee stretched high above my head was glowing from the light emanating from the small bonfire roaring in its center. I tried to lean back a bit as Yana Mangi crooned in the language of Lapland's native people, the Sami. She sang of "the little brook between the lakes" and of herding reindeer, a simple life conveyed with the kind of pleasant, ethereal sound I usually associate with the American Southwest. These are towns without cell towers, where people continue to observe rituals that have endured for centuries while making few concessions to the modern era. As each song came to an end, the audience of several dozen tourists expressed their appreciation the way one does when the temperature outside is beginning to dip to 35 degrees below zero Fahrenheit: with a muffled clapping, because everyone in the room was wearing mittens.

Mangi's concert -- which she has put on three nights a week each season for more than a dozen years -- is one of the few warm attractions at the Ice Hotel, the main reason why people across the globe visit Jukkasjarvi, which is 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle. That's because when you build a hotel entirely out of ice and snow, there is no indoor heating. The tepee was packed.

After nearly an hour the show, which included Mangi's husband on keyboards and an audience singalong, was over. I exited with several dozen tourists out into the dark and the snow, to the icy edifice that would be my home for the next two nights. A rush of wind passed over me, and I looked up at the black sky scattered with a few stars. It was only a matter of yards to the white, glowing building that offered some shelter from the Arctic winds, but as I made my way there I contemplated a simple fact: I wouldn't be that warm again anytime soon.

THE ICE HOTEL -- WHICH GIVES OFF AN EERIE BLUE GLOW when spotted from across the frozen Torne River -- is a massive, beautiful igloo. Sure, it has cathedral-like ceilings, intricate sculptures and electricity running throughout the building, but make no mistake: It's an igloo.

To step inside is to feel as if you have crossed into another civilization, which is at once more sophisticated than ours and more severe. Each of the two dozen or so intricately carved suites represents a world of its own. (Sixty other ice rooms without artistic carvings are cheaper to stay in and are reminiscent of actual igloos. Single ice suites range from $400 to $800 per night; simple ice rooms, $325 to $500.) During my stay, one suite, crafted by a Swedish painter, was called Virgin Angel, but the angel in question looked more like a sexy It Girl from the 1960s, with pert, snowy breasts and elaborately patterned ice wings. Another, called Projection Room, appeared to have trapped an enormous, twisted tree in ice. (In fact the two artists who created the latter room, Mark Szulgit and Julia Adzuki, had to methodically chip away, one after the other, to hollow out spaces in the ice to give the impression of a frozen trunk.) A glowing ice chandelier filled with electric lights dipped from the lobby's ceiling, illuminating the room, while a hotel worker quietly cleaned the lobby by sweeping the floor's snow cover.

Everything slows down a bit as you tromp through the Ice Hotel's halls with your boots and swaddled clothing, peering at the designs on the walls and the flower-inspired carvings paying homage to Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, who came up with the idea of taxonomic classification of plants and animals (2007 marked the 300th anniversary of his birth).

Part of the hotel's allure stems from its simplicity. Bergqvist and his art director, Arne Bergh, like to talk about the purity of "genuine Torne River ice," and they're not lying. The ice -- stacked up in thousands of blocks in a nearby storage facility -- is shockingly clear. While occasional cracks make patterns in the blocks, the ice itself is completely transparent -- unlike ordinary tap water -- which makes it look otherworldly.