Abisko, a tiny village in Swedish Lapland, sits almost 200km inside the Arctic Circle — far enough north that in deep winter the sun never climbs above the horizon at all. That sounds like a holiday-ruiner, but the writer behind a recent first-person account for The Guardian found the opposite: polar night turned out to be weirdly liberating, dissolving the usual pressure to squeeze sightseeing into daylight hours.

There's a solid practical reason travellers pick Abisko over flashier aurora spots. The village sits in the 'Abisko blue hole', a microclimate where surrounding mountains part the clouds, making it one of the most dependable places on Earth to see the northern lights. On the trip described, the aurora appeared twice in three nights — once mid-dinner, prompting a mass dash from the restaurant, and again from a snowy outcrop above frozen Lake Torneträsk, paired with Geminid shooting stars.

Getting there is a trip in itself: a sleeper-train run from London via Stockholm, arriving at Abisko Östra, a station of one platform and a glass shelter. Base camp was the Abisko Mountain Lodge, one of only a handful of places to stay, with a firelit bar and sauna (used repeatedly — you'll want one). Days are structured around short windows of usable light: a riverside walk where dusk arrived before 2pm, and a hours-long hike along Lake Torneträsk's shore through silver birches to a frozen waterfall picnic spot. A quirk of polar night is the 'hidden sun' — the sun stays down, but its pink and orange glow lingers in the sky for hours, muddling any sense of whether it's morning or evening.

Plans don't always cooperate. A booked cable-car ride up to Abisko Sky Station, a 900m mountain viewpoint, was scrapped for high winds; the guide pivoted to an aurora-watching session, then reindeer soup inside a Sámi-style lávvu tent, complete with local legends — the lights as dancing ancestors, or a fox spirit trailing snow across the sky — plus a crash course in forecasting apps like Aurora Buddy and My Aurora.

Who is this for? Slow travellers, aurora-chasers and anyone burned out on packed itineraries. The writer's takeaway is the real story: with no day-night boundary, the holiday stretches — long pickled-herring breakfasts, saunas between walks, and a superbly stocked local supermarket selling cloudberry jam, dense rye bread and an entire aisle of cheese tubes. If you've ever felt guilty napping on holiday, Abisko will cure you.

Story via The Guardian Travel.