Ice Hotel, Sweden

Construction

• The Ice Hotel Sweden is built from blocks of ice gathered from the Torne River, as well as bulldozers, chainsaws jackhammers.

• The building process starts in mid-November when the snow guns start humming and large clouds of snow start to drift along the Torne River.The snow is sprayed on huge steel forms and allowed to freeze. After a couple of days, the forms are removed, leaving a maze of free-standing corridors of snow.In the corridors, dividing walls are built in order to create rooms and suites. Ice blocks, harvested at springtime from Torne River, are now being transported into the hotel where selected artists from all over the world start creating the art and design of the perishable material.

• Each year, the ice hotel has a different design, usually spreading over a space of about 53,700 feet and about 4000 tonnes of ice. This year, the hotel was built with collaborative input from students of Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology.

Rooms and Amenities

• Guests can choose among 60 rooms and suites. This $400-per-night frozen icon has a chapel, art exhibition hall, cinema and bar.

• The Ice Hotel Sweden also features a number of other kinds of rooms, including a sauna, a reception hall, a multimedia theater and an ice chapel for weddings, baptisms and other ceremonies.
  

• Cool factor: A $1,000, 90-minute dogsled ride takes guests from the airport to the hotel.

• Breakfast buffet, morning sauna and towels are available of course – and there's a restaurant on site, made from ice, serving "whitefish roe, venison and reindeer, cloudberries and arctic raspberries. "All transformed into tasty delicacies guaranteed to please the most discerning gourmet."
  

• Interiors: Not only is the entire Sweden Ice Hotel structure made totally of ice, but all of the furniture and most of the decoration 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. Full jumpsuits made of beaver nylon are issued to guests of the ice hotel in Sweden, as are insulated body bags first developed for astronauts walking on the moon.

• The first ten bedrooms, which opened last week, are Art Suites, designed and created by artists from around the world. Each was chosen on the merits of their design but few have worked with ice before – their talents include sculpting, illustrating, filmmaking and woodwork.

• "You are awakened in the morning with a cup of hot lingonberry juice at your bedside."

• In the main area of the ice hotel in Sweden guests will also find a bar, where glowing cocktails served in glasses made of ice (but of course) are served to patrons, with an emphasis on ice-cold vodka. Drinks are served below zero degrees in the hotel’s Absolut Icebar, but food is offered in the more cozy surroundings of the hotel’s two restaurants, which serve wholesome warming dishes including local specialties such as reindeer and elk.

• The features of ice hotels are constantly evolving, as the buildings are re-constructed each year. Heated bathrooms are located near the ice hotel, as are heated cabins for travelers who want to be a part of the action, but not a part of the cold. Costs for an overnight stay range from $300 - $500 per night, depending on the size of your room. Be sure to book your stay well in advance, as the popularity of this hotel grows with each new winter season.

  Extra Information

The Sweden Ice Hotel is open for business beginning in December (depending on the weather) and ending in March. Click here to visit the official website of this hotel.

Ice hotels around the world

• ICEHOTEL in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden: the original and (I think) the best, it has such amenities as an ice bar and even an ice church.

• Ice Hotel Canada in Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier, Quebec, this ice hotel also has a chapel (for white weddings, of course) and even offers daytime tours for people who aren’t interested in spending the night on ice.
• The Aurora Ice Museum: at the Chena Hot Springs resort in Fairbanks, Alaska, can be booked for overnight stays, even though they no longer have actual hotel rooms made of ice, as they once did.
• The Igloo Village ice hotel, part of the Kangerlussuaq Hotel and Conference Centre in Greenland, is pretty minimalist as ice hotels go.
• Snow Village in Finland includes a bar and restaurant made of ice.
• Lainio Snow Village in Yllas, Finland offers both conventional and icy accommodations. Book your own ice suite!
• Snowland, also in Finland, is primarily an ice restaurant, but the property also features a handful of sleeping igloos.
• LumiLinna SnowCastle in Kemi, Finland, has the customary ice hotel, restaurant, and chapel—plus what appears to be a drawbridge. That makes (at least) four ice hotels in Finland. Wow.
• The Alta Igloo Hotel is located in Norwegian Lapland.
• The Kakslauttanen Cabins & Igloos in Ivalo, Norway, feature your choice of accommodation—log cabins or ice beds in ice rooms—and is apparently quite popular with honeymooners. Go figure.
• Hotel Ice Balea Lake in Romania is a relative newcomer, and doesn’t even have its own Web site. However, another site claims: “The rooms are equipped with matrimonial bed from ice, covered by lamb fur…” I think that description speaks for itself.
• Iglu-Dorf runs five different igloo hotel villages in different parts of Switzerland each winter.

cool FACTS

• The Ice hotels are built near rivers where workers can draw water, freeze it into large blocks of snow and ice and cut the ice into large blocks before trucking it into place. The Igloos are cut out by hand.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 Ice Hotel is temporary shelter. Once the outside temperatures climb above 0°C (32°F), the structure will begin to melt.
  

• Ice hotels are large extravagant complex Eskimo igloos. Igloos are built of snow. During construction, snowflakes that fall on the igloo melt and then quickly refreeze into ice. Once an igloo is complete, the Eskimos place a hot lamp inside and seal the entrance. As the snow begins to melt, it runs down the interior walls of the igloo. When the walls are all wet, the builders remove the lamp and leave the door open. The sudden exposure to the cold outside air freezes the water on the walls, creating a layer of ice. The igloo now has a triple layer of insulation: an ice coating on the interior of the snow walls, the snow walls themselves, and ice coating on the exterior of the snow walls..

• Some 10,000 tonnes are used to build the original Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, 200km north of the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland (icehotel.com), while 15,000 tonnes of snow and 500 tonnes of ice are used to build the one in Quebec (icehotel-canada.com).

• Ice also gives structural strength to both igloos and the Ice Hotel. Hotel guests do not have to worry that the building might collapse if a blizzard dumps several feet of snow on the roof.
  

• The interior of the ice hotels glitter with elaborate ice furniture, ice bars and even ice glasses. Colorful lighting makes the structures look more like magical snow castles than frigid arctic dwellings.

• Sweden's ice hotel uses geothermal energy to provide its electricity but the other ice hotels don't have that natural resource at their disposal. Instead, they require vast quantities of electricity to create the ice as well as to power the on-going guest amenities such as the toilets , bar etc. And all that energy provides just one night's stay as guests typically spend the remainder of their holiday in nearby purpose-built log cabins.

• How is it possible to stay warm in a hotel room built of ice? The secret is the fact that ice and snow are good insulators. An insulator is a material that prevents or slows the flow of energy in the form of heat, electricity, or sound. In contrast, a conductor is a material that allows the energy to flow. For example, feathers are a heat insulator; aluminum is a heat conductor. Ice helps keep the Ice Hotel relatively warm. It traps the heat inside the hotel room and keeps the colder air outside. Even if the outside temperature drops to well below freezing, the temperature inside the hotel room remains just a few degrees below freezing.

Cool !

Ice Hotel , Sweden



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Ice Hotels - Hottest destinations

This is not an urban legend, 'they' are real hotels available for guest stays. An ice hotel is a temporary hotel made up entirely of snow and sculpted blocks of ice,drawn from a nearby winter. Today there are ice hotels in Sweden,Romania,Norway,Canada, Alaska and Finland. The original ( first) Ice Hotel was constructed around 1989 near the village of Jukkasjärvi, Kiruna,Sweden .This ice hotel has been around for over 18 years. The ice hotels are promoted by their sponsors and have special features for travelers who are interested in novelties and unusual environments, and thus are in the class of destination hotels. All the ice hotels are reconstructed every year.A constant sub-zero temperature is needed for 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.

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