Lapland braces for `super-winter'
Northern Finland has long been embraced as the ultimate festive getaway, but now the region where snowfall is all but guaranteed is bracing for a “superwinter” of tourism. With new flight connections from European cities including Vienna and Madrid, Rovaniemi airport in Lapland is expecting record demand over the coming months, the Times of London said. The additional flights will double connections to the region, which has also benefited from the success of the Disney franchise Frozen, which draws on the Indigenous Sami culture of Scandinavia. “We call this our super-winter,” Petri Vuori, an executive with airport firm Finavia, told national broadcaster Yle. “This will be a record winter in Rovaniemi. Compared to the previous year, the number of flights will increase by 20 per cent.” The region has been promoted as the “real” home of Santa Claus ever since former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited at the end of the Second World War. She sent a letter to then-president Harry S. Truman, said to be the first mailed from the Arctic Circle, from a cabin built for her visit and which later became the Santa Claus village tourist attraction. The local post office now receives more than 30,000 letters a day from children writing to Santa, the paper reported. Tourism has bounced back from the pandemic, climbing to new heights thanks to visitors from the Netherlands, France and Britain — but also from the burgeoning package-tour market from China. The snowbound area has been the setting for several popular television series such as the Finnish-german crime drama Arctic Circle and the Apple TV+ show Constellation. The surge of visitors has not gone down well with all of the Sami people, some of whom have raised concerns over exploitation of their culture.