Ice Hotels

The Stockhorn igloo village is raised each winter on a shoulder of the mountain above Lake Thun, reached by cable car and then a short walk across the snow. It is built from snow rather than clear ice: domes packed, hollowed and carved by hand, linked by tunnels, with the carving inside each sleeping dome changed from season to season.

Nights work the way they do at every property of this kind. Guests are equipped with expedition-grade sleeping bags and sheepskins, briefed carefully, and kept out in the evening — fondue in a heated dome, a whirlpool set in the snow, a guided snowshoe walk under whatever the sky is doing — until it is genuinely time to sleep. The interior holds a few degrees below freezing regardless of the weather outside.

The mountain setting is the reason to choose this one over its lowland cousins. The view runs down to the lake and across to the Bernese peaks, and the first cable car of the morning does not arrive until well after breakfast, so the village has the ridge to itself at dawn.

Sorrisniva has been rebuilt every winter since the end of the nineties on the bank of the Alta River, well inside the Arctic Circle. The construction is snow and river ice, and the design changes annually: sculptors are commissioned each season, so the corridors, the bar and the individual suites are carved anew rather than repeated.

The building contains an ice bar, a chapel that is used for real ceremonies, and sleeping rooms kept at a steady few degrees below zero. Guests sleep in thermal bags on beds of ice with reindeer hides over them, and the operation runs a heated service building alongside for showers, changing and breakfast — which is the arrangement that makes the whole thing workable rather than merely endurable.

Alta is a good address for the aurora: it is far north, inland enough to escape much of the coastal cloud, and has a long local history of taking the northern lights seriously. Snowmobile trips, river excursions and reindeer visits are arranged from the property through the season, which lasts from around the turn of the year until the spring melt takes the building.