Ice Hotel

ICE HOTEL is a hotel built of ice and snow. Ice hotels are oversized, extravagant igloos. Solid blocks of ice make up their barrel-shaped structures. But inside, ice hotels glitter with elaborate ice furniture and ice sculptures. Colorful lighting makes the structures look more like magical snow castles than frigid arctic dwellings. All of the ice hotels are reconstructed every year, and are dependent upon constant sub-freezing temperatures during construction and operation. The walls, fixtures, and fittings are made entirely of ice, and are held together using a substance known as snice, which takes the place of mortar in a traditional brick-built hotel.

The hotels are built near rivers where workers can draw water, freeze it into ice and cut the ice into large blocks before trucking it into place. Extensive, large-capacity ice hotels take about five to six weeks to build. But when spring comes, all the hard work melts away, and the hotels must wait until winter to rebuild.

The first ice hotel was built in 1989 in a village called Jukkasjärvi in northern Lapland, Sweden, 200 km north of the Arctic Circle. It started as a modest, 60-square-meter igloo and now it is the world's largest hotel of ice and snow of about 5500 square meters.

 

The ICEHOTEL Sweden has a different design every year, built from blocks of ice gathered from the Torne River. Creating the ice hotel each winter takes 10,000 tons of clear river ice, plus 30,000 tons of snow. The Ice Hotel Sweden offers different kinds of accommodation to choose from for about 100 guests and also have other features like a sauna, a reception hall, a multimedia theatre, an ice chapel for weddings and ABSOLUT ICEBAR.

The Sweden Ice Hotel is open for business beginning in December (depending on the weather) and ending in March. Not only is the entire Sweden Ice Hotel structure made totally of ice, but all of the furniture and most of the décor found within is also made from ice. Beds at the Sweden Ice Hotel are slabs of solid ice, and chairs are carved from blocks of ice. Statues and other forms of art are carved throughout the hotel, in rooms and in hallways, and tend to be quite ornate. For comfort, reindeer skin blankets are draped over beds and chairs to offer (moderate) warmth.