Lapland travel guide
Fifteen practical guides are ready, from where Lapland is and how to fly there to what a trip costs, what to wear, car hire, the night train, the Arctic Circle, the Sámi, the live webcams, the midnight sun, photographing the Northern Lights, Lapland food and wildlife. What we could not confirm is named inside each one.
Start here if you are still deciding
This site covers Finnish Lapland, the northernmost region of Finland. Two guides come before all the others, because they settle what kind of trip this is going to be.
Where is Lapland?
Lapland is not a country. Where the region is, how far north it reaches, and the time difference with the UK.
Lapland holidays
The six kinds of Lapland holiday, who each one suits, and how to choose between a package and planning it yourself.
Getting there, and paying for it
With that settled, the next two answer how you arrive and what it will cost you.
Flights to Lapland from the UK
Which airport suits your base, the direct winter routes from the UK, and connecting through Helsinki the rest of the year.
What a Lapland trip costs
What drives the cost, room and activity prices in EUR as the operators publish them, and where the money goes furthest.
Lapland on a budget
How to spend less, which is a different question from what it costs. It also explains why we have no deals to sell you.
Flights to Tromsø
The Norwegian side, where no equivalent of Finavia’s route listing exists, so the page says what we could confirm and no more.
The light, the sky, the food and the animals
Four guides to what you will see and eat once you are there, each one clear about what nobody can promise you.
The midnight sun
What the midnight sun is, when it starts and ends at different latitudes in Finnish Lapland, and what it does to your sleep and to the aurora.
Photographing the Northern Lights
How to photograph the aurora with a camera or a phone, from the settings photography guides publish, and why the camera sees more than your eye.
Lapland food
What people eat in Lapland, from sautéed reindeer to cloudberries, which names carry EU protected status, and where a visitor finds them.
Lapland wildlife
The animals you are likely to see, the ones you almost certainly will not, and why no one can promise a sighting.
Everything else we have written
The Arctic Circle
What the line is, where Rovaniemi marks it, and why the marker and the true line are not in the same place.
What to wear
Three layers, wool next to the skin, and the extremities that end a day outside.
Getting around Lapland
Airport transfers, buses between the resorts, car hire and winter driving.
The train to Lapland
The night train from Helsinki: what it is like, what it costs and who it does not suit.
Sámi culture
Who the Sámi are in Finland, where the Sámi homeland is, and what the Sámi Parliament’s own guidance asks of visitors.
Lapland webcams
The official live cameras, what each shows, and what a webcam cannot tell you.
What is missing, and when it arrives
Every guide we claimed is now written, so the gaps are not missing pages. They sit inside the pages. Several figures defeated us on a primary source, and each page names its own. Those lines are the ones we go back to first.
Who this is not for
This page is a list of our guides, not a guide in itself. If you already know the place or the month you are going, start with that page instead.
Tell us your dates and we will plan the trip
A planner replies within 2 business days, with one page: which base, which week, what to book first and what we would skip.
Sources
- Regional Council of Lapland, information about Lapland, checked 17 September 2026
Last checked 17 September 2026. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and date the change.
Photographs, all from Wikimedia Commons: Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park in January by Ximonic (Simo Räsänen), CC BY-SA 4.0, colour-adjusted. Each is cropped and resized here, and our versions carry the same licence as the original.
