Kemi

Kemi is not the Lapland of the brochures. There are no reindeer pulling sleighs toward a glowing cabin here, or at least none that anyone arranges for you. It is a working town on the Gulf of Bothnia, built around a pulp mill whose presence you sense before you see the sea, and for most of the year it has the unglamorous, slightly defiant feel of a place that exists for reasons other than tourism. Lia and I came in February, in the dark, specifically because of two things Kemi does that nowhere else quite manages.

The icebreaker that lets you float in a frozen sea

The first is the Sampo. It is a genuine icebreaker, retired from clearing shipping lanes along this coast, now spending its winters taking passengers out onto the frozen Gulf to do the only thing it knows how to do: smash ice. We stood at the rail as the ship rode up onto the pack and crushed it under its own weight, a sound less like cracking than like a slow, structural groan, the whole hull shuddering. The ice here is not thin. It is a solid white field that people drive cars across, and watching a ten-thousand-tonne ship break it like crockery rearranges your sense of scale.

Then they let you swim. You are sealed into a watertight survival suit — a bright orange thing that makes everyone look like an abandoned buoy — and lowered into the channel of broken ice the ship has just carved. The suit traps so much air you cannot sink, and the insulation is total: I lay back in water that was, by any reasonable measure, trying to kill me, and felt nothing but a faint pressure. Lia laughed so hard she took on a little water through the neck seal and had to be fished out early. It is genuinely one of the strangest physical sensations I have had anywhere.

A castle that melts every spring

The second reason is the SnowCastle. Every winter since the mid-1990s, Kemi has built an entire fortress out of snow and sea ice — walls, towers, a chapel, a restaurant, a hotel where you can sleep in a carved ice room under reindeer hides. And every spring it melts back into the Gulf, so that the version you visit will never exist again. The design changes each year, which means the locals who build it are essentially making enormous sculptures they know are doomed, an attitude I found quietly moving.

We ate dinner in the snow restaurant, plates resting on a table of ice, the cold radiating up through the bench into my legs while reindeer stew went lukewarm faster than I could eat it. It is a gimmick, obviously. But it is a gimmick built with real craft, by people who could be doing something warmer, and I left fond of the whole improbable enterprise.

When to go: late January through March, when both the icebreaker cruises and the SnowCastle are open. Book the Sampo well ahead — it sails on a fixed schedule and fills fast with day-trippers up from Rovaniemi.