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. Each one names the points still unconfirmed.
Start here if you are still deciding
This site covers Finnish Lapland, the northernmost region of Finland. Read these two first. They settle what kind of trip you are planning.
Where is Lapland?
Where the region is (it is not a country), 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
How you get there, and what you will spend.
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.
Lapland’s airports
Rovaniemi, Kittilä, Ivalo, Kuusamo and the smaller ones: which resorts each is near, and what bus or taxi meets a late flight.
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 once you know what a trip costs, and why we have no deals to sell you.
Flights to Tromsø
The Norwegian side, which has no route listing like Finavia’s, so the page sticks to the routes we could confirm.
The light, the sky, the food and the animals
What you will see and eat once you are there.
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, and the ones you almost certainly will not.
Everything else we have written
The Arctic Circle
What the line is, where Rovaniemi marks it, and how far the true line now runs from the marker.
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 planned is written. The gaps are inside them: figures we could not find in a primary source, each named on its own page, and those are the first lines we recheck.
Who this is not for
Anyone who already knows the place or the month they are going: start with that page instead. This one is a list of guides.
Sources
- Regional Council of Lapland, information about Lapland, checked 17 September 2026
Last checked 17 September 2026.
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.
