Kiruna, the most northern town in Sweden, is renowned for its beautiful snowy landscapes and the Northern Lights.
For a near-certain white Christmas, Kiruna in Sweden is your best bet. This winter wonderland boasts a 70% chance of snow on Christmas Day. It’s also relatively undiscovered, with only 100 average searches a month according to DFDS.
A relatively new city founded at the beginning of the 20th century, Kiruna is home to the world’s largest iron ore mine which you can visit. Due to the mine, the entire city is gradually shifting east away from the mining, resulting in interesting newly built buildings to explore, reports the Mirror.
A stroll around Kiruna will reveal charming pastel houses and a stunning wooden church constructed in 1912, designed to resemble a traditional Sami tent. Kiruna and its surrounding area are home to the Sami people, the indigenous people of Sweden, and their rich culture permeates city life here.
Nutti Sami Siida is a Sami-run tourism company that has been operating in Kiruna since 1996.
The company was established following a particularly harsh winter that made grazing reindeer herds more expensive, so the company’s owners decided to introduce visitors to their way of life to fund the feeding of their herd.
Now, you can choose from a number of activities from reindeer experiences to reindeer-drawn sleds – a perfect Christmas activity.
It is worth noting that if you’re planning a Christmas holiday in this snowy paradise then it will be dark. As Kiruna is so far north, the sun sets at around 2.30pm, making for a short day – but the perfect opportunity for star gazing.
To get there it’s easiest to fly to Stockholm and then catch one of several daily flights to Kiruna from there. There are also trains which go from the Swedish capital but these take much longer with an average of 16 hours.