Where to Stay in Arjeplog, Norrbotten County

Arjeplog sits in the Lappland province of northern Sweden, deep within Sápmi. Lake Hornavan, the deepest in the country, lies at its edge. Each winter, carmakers from across Europe haul prototype vehicles north to test brakes and tyres on the frozen lakes that surround the town.

The Silvermuseet, founded by the physician Einar Wallquist, holds a celebrated collection of Sámi silver. Sámi heritage shapes the region.

The Silver Museum holds the town's memory. Its collection of Sami silver, gathered by the doctor Einar Wallquist over a lifetime of work in the mountains, sits alongside tools, sleds and the everyday objects of a herding life. Arjeplogs kyrka stands nearby, an old church for a parish spread across a huge mountain district.

Water frames it all, Hornavan and its sister lakes reaching deep into the fells. For the long view, the bare top of Galtispuoda opens the whole lake country and, at midsummer, the sun that never quite sets.

Arjeplog is old Sami country, a Pite Sami heartland of reindeer, fishing and the high fells. Its written history turns on silver. In the sixteen-thirties a silver strike at Nasafjäll, high on the Norwegian border, drew the Crown into these mountains, and Sami families were forced to haul the ore by reindeer through the snow, a brutal chapter that the mines never repaid.

A church and a market grew at Arjeplog to serve the district and the trade. The silver gave out, but the town held on. It became the parish and market centre for a vast mountain municipality, linked south and west by the road that still carries the name Silvervägen, the Silver Road.

Early in the twentieth century a young doctor, Einar Wallquist, settled here to serve the scattered people of the fells and, over the years, gathered the Sami silver collection that became the Silver Museum. Then came the cold trade. The reliable ice and the still, deep lakes turned Arjeplog into a winter proving ground for the world's carmakers, filling the town each winter with test crews.

Reindeer still move through the same country, and the lakes still hold their silver light. The fells outlast every trade that comes to them.

Arjeplog lies in the south-western part of Norrbotten County, in the mountains of interior Lapland close to the Arctic Circle. The town stands on an isthmus between lakes, with Hornavan, the deepest in Sweden, and a chain of others filling the valleys around it. Water is everywhere here.

Westward the land climbs steeply through birch and bare rock to the high fells along the Norwegian border, where the Pite River has its source, while eastward it falls away into endless forest. The municipality is huge and almost roadless in its western half.

Arjeplog has a subarctic climate, made harsher by altitude and the reach of the mountains. Winters are long, snowy and reliably cold, with thick ice on the lakes and a still, dry chill that holds for months, the conditions that make the district a winter testing ground. Summer comes late and leaves early.

It brings cool, bright days and nights that barely darken so close to the Arctic Circle, with the fells green only briefly before the first frosts. Snow lingers on the high ground long into summer.

Arjeplog is a road town. The Silvervägen, route 95, runs through it from the Bothnian coast in the east over the mountains to Bodø on the Norwegian sea, and a branch road links south toward Arvidsjaur and the inland railway. No train reaches Arjeplog itself.

The nearest airport and the nearest station both lie at Arvidsjaur, a drive to the east, and from there the Silver Road brings travellers the rest of the way up among the lakes. The mountains keep it remote.