There is a particular kind of stillness that settles over Finnish Lapland after dark, deep enough that the sky itself becomes the main event. At Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort, roughly 250 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle near the small town of Saariselkä, that stillness comes with a view most travellers only imagine: lying beneath a thermal glass ceiling, warm under blankets, watching the aurora borealis ripple in green and violet directly overhead. This is not a novelty add-on to a Lapland trip. It is the reason an entire global glass igloo travel category exists in the first place, and Kakslauttanen remains its undisputed original.
The Resort That Started It All
Kakslauttanen’s story begins in the 1970s, when its original site, now known as the East Village, grew out of a small roadside stop deep in the wilderness near Urho Kekkonen National Park. The now-famous glass igloos followed decades later, introduced in 1999 as the first structures of their kind in Lapland, thermal glass domes engineered to retain warmth despite Arctic temperatures that regularly plunge well below freezing. What began as twenty igloos has since expanded into the largest glass igloo resort in the world, spanning two villages, East and West, four kilometres apart, with more than two hundred units ranging from classic glass igloos to Kelo-log suites built from centuries-old pine.
Watching the Sky Without Leaving Bed
The appeal is disarmingly simple: no boots, no thermal layers, no standing in sub-zero wind waiting for the sky to perform. Guests lie in bed as the aurora unfolds through a curved glass roof engineered to stay clear and insulated even in harsh conditions. Aurora sightings at this latitude, sitting well inside the auroral zone, are possible from late August through early April, though the resort itself is candid that visibility depends entirely on solar activity and clear skies, no operator, however well positioned, can guarantee the lights will appear on any given night. What Kakslauttanen guarantees instead is positioning: minimal light pollution, an unobstructed sky, and a room built for exactly this kind of waiting.
Beyond the Igloo: A Full Arctic World
Kakslauttanen has grown well past its original glass rooms. The resort now includes Kakslauttanen Cosmos, home to the largest planetarium dome in Scandinavia, alongside an on-site brewery, distillery, design shop, and art gallery. Guests can also experience the world’s largest smoke sauna, traditional Finnish sauna culture taken to genuinely monumental scale, or step from its heat directly into an ice pool nearby, a jolt that regulars insist is part of the point. By day, the surrounding wilderness offers husky sledding, snowmobiling, reindeer encounters, and roughly 200 kilometres of cross-country ski tracks starting directly outside the resort, since Nordic skiing remains something close to a national pastime in Finland.
What to Know Before Booking
Comfort here is genuine but not five-star polish; guests are largely paying for location, warmth engineering, and a genuinely rare experience rather than plush amenities. Prices have also climbed considerably, a glass igloo that cost roughly 500 euros a night in 2019 now commonly runs closer to 800 to 1,000 euros during peak aurora season, reflecting both demand and the resort’s continued expansion. The nearest airport, Ivalo, sits roughly thirty to forty minutes away, and travellers should plan for extremely short winter daylight, by late December the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon at all, part of what makes the aurora viewing here so exceptional in the first place.
Why It’s Worth the Journey
Plenty of resorts across Lapland now offer glass-roofed rooms, but Kakslauttanen remains the reference point the entire category is measured against, the place where the concept was proven, refined, and scaled into something genuinely without rival. For travellers chasing one of nature’s most elusive spectacles, there is something fitting about doing it from the exact spot where watching the aurora from bed first became possible at all.
