The Cahkal Hotel is cosy perfection in the wilds of Finnish Lapland

A boutique hideaway deep in Finnish Lapland, the Cahkal Hotel blends Nordic-cool design, foraged fine dining and cocooning comfort with views that stretch across Arctic wilderness. A rare gem in the far north, it’s a quiet, character-rich stay shaped by nature, Sami culture and thoughtful hospitality

Why stay here

This is rare: a faultless hotel blessed by an essence that is hard to quantify but fills you with joy and comfort. This is the Cahkal Hotel in far north-west Finland, 400 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. It’s the hotel that keeps on giving, from the warm, welcoming check-in to the cocoon-like, Nordic-cool rooms (only 23 of them), the world-class and locally foraged food, the delightful and knowledgeable staff and the year-round activities that immerse you in the beauty and tranquillity of the Lapland landscape. There is also a super-modern sauna with great views, which is appropriate as ‘cahkal’ means ‘long view’ in one of the Lapland Sami languages.

The owners, Margit and Ville Eskonen, have produced something very special here.

Design

As you might expect in this remote, Arctic environment, the hotel makes good use of its local materials, namely pine wood, which makes the rooms, restaurant and sauna all very homely and cosy. As if to emphasise the point, the sauna’s lounge area has floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with logs. There are other local design touches, influenced by the owners’ passion for the surrounding environment, including landscape photographs and a pair of antique skis repurposed as an artwork on a corridor wall.

In the suite

I stay in both the 45 square metre, two-bedroom Cahkal Suite and a 25 square metre Superior Room. The suite is in a separate building right next to the main hotel and includes a spacious, white-tiled bathroom and your very own private sauna. There is a cosy lounge with armchairs, a pine-wood table and floor-to ceiling windows that lead onto an open-air deck – an ideal spot to munch on the hotel’s homemade white chocolate and cranberry biscuits, and spot reindeer. The same building also houses the 18 square metre Cahkal Studio and can be booked as an entire house stay.

Even though a Superior Room (they are all in the main hotel) is about half the size of the Cahkal Suite, it can pass for a mini-suite. As well as a sumptuous king bed there is a seating area with comfy couch and chairs, offering views over the birch woods and into the distance.

Dining

Get ready for some serious taste sensations at Aika Kitchen & Bar. Chef Olli Luukkanen is a beefy Viking of a chap but he produces the most delicate and fragrant dishes made from seasonal ingredients. When I visit in July, he is using spruce sprouts for some dishes; the green shoots of the spruce pine trees. My spruce sprout cheddar salad (with local strawberries and pickled carrots) is followed by a delicious Arctic Char fillet in birch-leaf emulsion with parsnip, asparagus and potatoes roasted in local herbs, then a sorbet made from crowberries (a staple food of Sami reindeer herders) with white chocolate and more of those yummy spruce sprouts.

Two travelling Danes on the next table are having the local reindeer, cooked with celeriac and an angelica Hollandaise sauce. Their silence and smiles say it all.

Aika is more tundra-to-table than farm-to-table but the ethos is the same. The reindeer roam the land around the hotel and the slopes of the adjacent Saana Hill, the fish is from the lake less than one kilometre away and the angelica travels all of 20 metres from the banks of the hotel’s stream.

Local ingredients are also used to make the cocktails: homemade spruce-orange syrup works deliciously with tequila in the Wild Tundra, while homemade birch syrup gives a local zest to the gin-based Arctic Garden. Breakfast is great too, with Nordic pickles, cured fish, cooked dishes and all manner of homemade jams, as well as interesting powders to sprinkle on your porridge, such as lingonberry and dried sea-buckthorn.

Two travelling Danes on the next table are having the local reindeer, cooked with celeriac and an angelica Hollandaise sauce. Their silence and smiles say it all.

Special touches

One of the owners’ many excellent decisions was to exclude TVs. Not only does this make the hotel quieter but it also draws your eyes to the wide Arctic landscapes. This means you feel much more connected to the environment and eager to get out there and experience it. Most visitors to Lapland come in winter for husky-sleigh rides and snowmobile adventures through whiter-than-white forests, and to snowshoe after dark under dazzling Northern Lights. Visiting in summer is totally different but just as wonderful. The hotel organises boat trips across the lake to the three-country cairn where you can step from Finland into Sweden and Norway (no passport required). You can also fly-fish, cycle e-bikes, hike under the midnight sun and forage for mushrooms and berries.

If that’s all too energetic, simply get cosy with a cocktail in front of the log fire in the lobby and wait for the next delicious meal to be ready.

If you want to upgrade

The Cahkal Suite is the highest category on offer.

CAHKAL HOTEL
Cahkal Suite
Size: 45m²
Price per night: For a three-night, bed-and-breakfast stay in July 2026 (including taxes) the Suite is A$3,206 (€1,800), while a Superior Room is A$1,870 (€1,050).
Website: https://cahkalhotel.fi/