Four days in Rovaniemi: burnt to the ground in 1944 and rebuilt in the shape of a reindeer's head

Rovaniemi's centre is a post war town and reads as one: low, wide, generously spaced, a lot of it built in the fifteen years after 1945 when the whole of Lapland was being reconstructed at once. The pedestrian street and the market square are the middle of it. The square is officially Lordi's Square, renamed after the local monster masked metal band won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2006, which is the single most Finnish sequence of events available.

The Lutheran church, ten minutes up the hill, was finished in 1950 and is worth going into for one thing. Lennart Segerstråle painted an enormous fresco behind the altar called the Fountain of Life, and he set the whole biblical scene in Lapland: the landscape is northern, the water is a river rather than a Jordan, and where a Renaissance painter would have put lambs there are reindeer. Beside it, the arboretum around the little lake at Kirkkolampi is a five minute walk and free.

Finish at the river. The Jätkänkynttilä bridge crosses the Kemijoki at the north end of the centre, and its single tall pylon carries a bright yellow flame at the top, lit at night: a jätkänkynttilä is a lumberjack's candle, a split log stood on end and burnt from the inside, which is what the loggers used to light their camps on the rivers below. The whole town used to live on floating timber down this water. Standing on the bridge at dusk in winter is the moment Rovaniemi stops being an airport town.

Arktikum is the reason to give Rovaniemi a day rather than a stopover. It is a glass tube a hundred and seventy metres long driven out of a hillside towards the river, with the exhibitions buried under the ground beside it, and it holds two things at once: a science centre about the Arctic as a region, its climate, its light, its people and how all three are changing, and the provincial museum of Lapland, which covers the Sami and the history of this specific place, including the burning and the reconstruction. The Sami material is done with the Sami rather than about them, which is not universal. Allow two hours and note that the glass corridor is genuinely cold in winter, which is the point.

Pilke is next door and takes forty minutes. It is about the northern forest as an economy: what grows here, how slowly, what is taken out of it and what that costs, laid out for children and honest enough for adults. The building is a demonstration piece in itself, timber almost all the way through. It has been provisionally slated for closure at the end of 2026, so this may be a limited offer.

Korundi, back towards the centre, is an art museum and concert hall in a bus garage from 1933, one of the very few buildings in Rovaniemi that predates the fire, because the Germans left it standing. The collection is modern Finnish art, the Chamber Orchestra of Lapland plays here, and after a day of the Arctic and the forest it is a useful change of subject.

Santa Claus Village is a tourist trap and you should go anyway. It sits seven kilometres north of town on bus 8, on the line of the Arctic Circle as it was calculated when the place was built, which has since drifted a couple of kilometres north because the earth's tilt wobbles; the painted line on the ground is therefore both the reason everyone is there and slightly wrong. Santa is on duty every day of the year in a building at the end of it, and the meeting is free even though the photograph is not.

The part that is genuinely worth your time is the post office. It has its own postmark, it handles letters addressed to Santa Claus from all over the world, hundreds of thousands of them a year, and it will hold a card you post today and deliver it at Christmas. There is a room where you can see the mail that has arrived. Beyond that it is souvenir shops, a sledding hill for children, safari operators selling husky and snowmobile trips, and in winter a set of lit ice sculptures that are better than they need to be.

Santapark is a walk away and is a different proposition: an amusement park built inside a cavern blasted out of the rock, which was originally intended as an emergency store. It is warm, it is underground, and it is aimed squarely at children. It opens for the winter season only.

The reindeer are the reason to stay out here into the afternoon. Several farms operate at and around the Arctic Circle, with a short sleigh ride, a chance to feed the animals lichen, and someone who herds them for a living explaining what that actually involves in a country where reindeer husbandry is a legal right rather than a hobby. Book ahead in winter.

Ounasvaara is the fell across the river, twenty minutes' walk from the centre and about two hundred metres above it, and it is where Rovaniemi goes outdoors. In winter it has thirteen downhill runs, a snow park and a hundred kilometres of cross country track lit through the dark months; in summer it is trekking, mountain biking and disc golf. Either way the top gives you the town, the two rivers meeting below it and an unbroken horizon of forest in every other direction.

If you have three or four hours, the marked nature trail is a five kilometre loop through conifer forest and small bogs with information boards in English, two springs you can drink from, and a lean-to with a fireplace at the far end. Reindeer are the most likely animal you will see; Siberian jays will find you if you have food. Parts of it are rough underfoot and the markings on the open rocky section need attention.

It is also the nearest dark sky to the centre, so if you are on an evening flight and the forecast is clear, this is a free alternative to a tour.