A tourist season that stretches from October to March has been anything but jolly for some residents of the “Official Hometown of Santa Claus.”
After dinner at the Bull Bar and Grill in the small Finnish city of Rovaniemi, Mariel Tähtivaara, a law student, popped into a supermarket to grab some dessert.
As she perused the chocolate mousses, a short woman with dark hair walked up to her, shaking a milk carton.
“Excuse me,” she said in English with a Spanish or maybe Italian accent. “But can you tell me if this has lactose?”
Tähtivaara scanned the label – in Finnish – and told her no.
Then, as Tähtivaara was moving through the cookie and cracker aisle, a man with his wife and small child, puffed up in heavy jackets for a winter holiday, held up a cracker package.
“Do these have cheese in them?” he asked.
She saw more tourists in snowmobile suits lingering by the cashier. Before they could make eye contact, she got out of there.
“I was thinking: Here we go again,” she said.
These were small impositions, but enough was enough. If you’re blonde and therefore identifiable as a likely native of Rovaniemi, you can barely move around a supermarket during tourist season – and it’s all Santa’s fault.
Santa’s hometown
A simple marketing idea, playing off a cherished childhood fantasy, has made a small city on the edge of the Arctic Circle almost unliveable for many people who live there. And it’s not just the needy tourists in the dairy or cracker aisle. It’s also the noisy Airbnbs, the escalating housing crunch, the sidewalks so crowded you can’t walk down them without bumping into people and the car doors slamming in the middle of the night.
And it all started when the Nazis came to town.
Early in World War II, Finland allied with the Nazis, who built a big base in Rovaniemi, a Lapland railway hub. But by October 1944, the Nazis were losing, and the Soviet Red Army was marching into Eastern Europe. As a little memento for the Finns and the Russians, the retreating German soldiers burned Rovaniemi to the ground.
That left a blank canvas. So after the war, Finland asked Alvar Aalto, the celebrated Finnish architect, to redesign the city. Aalto, known for his bold churches, concert halls and kitchen stools, came up with an idea: why not remake the ruined town in the shape of a reindeer head, with the peripheral roads shooting out like antlers, to honour the area’s connection to reindeer herding?
Aalto’s timing was perfect. At that moment, the Government was promoting Finland, over rival claims from Denmark, Norway, the United States and Greenland, as the real home of Santa Claus. But it took some time for Santa to make his entrance.
In 1984, just after Christmas, a Soviet missile, launched from bordering Russia, misfired. It speared into a frozen Finnish lake a few hours’ drive from Rovaniemi. International journalists and officials flocked in to search for missile pieces. The head of Rovaniemi’s tourism board came up with a cunning plan: let’s send Santa to the crash site.
Photos from Finnish archives show a man in a red suit with a droopy hat standing on a frozen lake bed next to mangled missile wreckage, men in fur caps smirking behind him.
A few months later, in June 1985, Santa Claus Village opened 8km north of downtown Rovaniemi. It started out modestly – just one old log cabin and a few souvenir shops.
Business began to grow slowly. At first, it was mostly Finns.
“It was very peaceful,” said Tähtivaara, who visited as a girl. She remembered going snowmobiling, zooming across an endless plain of white.
“And there weren’t other people there,” she said.
But Rovaniemi knew it was on to something. In 2009, the city trademarked itself as “the Official Hometown of Santa Claus”. And the area had another big draw in the northern lights. Upper Finland is an excellent place to spot the spooky green, sometimes even purple, of the aurora borealis smeared across the dark winter sky. The Santa-industrial complex ramped up.
Tour operators imported all kinds of stuff that was not indigenous to Lapland but fun anyway: dog sledding, igloos, a hotel bar made out of ice. The Christmas season grew, too. It now stretches from October to the end of March. And the city began to change, very fast.
Meeting St Nick
When I flew into Rovaniemi Airport in late February, the first thing I saw was a sign that said: “Welcome to Lapland. Your search for Santa starts here.”
The terminal was packed with people in puffy jackets and Moon Boots. The airport underwent a major expansion a few years ago and now takes direct flights from Madrid; Düsseldorf, Germany; and dozens of other cities, and even charters from the Middle East. I could hear Hebrew, Hindi, Turkish, Spanish – a whole slew of the world’s languages.
As I headed out, clutching the big plastic key to a car with ice studs in the tyres, I was surprised by how not cold it was. I was on the rim of the Arctic Circle in winter, and it wasn’t even freezing. Climate change is unfolding here four times as fast as across the rest of the planet, making all the seasons go haywire.
In town, I spotted a little red cabin with a Santa sign, which confused me because I knew Santa Claus Village was a little farther north. Then I noticed, in much smaller lettering, that this was Santa’s “city office”. A warm yellow light was still on. I opened the door and found Santa waiting.
Tourism officials in Rovaniemi are stunned by how many people are coming to see him. Sanna Kärkkäinen, the managing director of Visit Rovaniemi, the local tourism board, said that each year since the pandemic, the number of visitors had hit a new high. In 2024, the city had 1.5 million overnight stays, more than double the number 10 years ago. This in a town of 60,000 permanent residents.
“It’s kind of growth on top of growth,” she said.
Tourism generates more than €400 million (more than $768 million) a year, Kärkkäinen added, and provides jobs for nearly 2000 people.
I identified myself to Santa as a visiting journalist but didn’t ask for his real name because that didn’t seem right. Santa, eager to chat, shared some of the things that had happened in his little red cabin.
“Once,” he told me, “I had some young women who wanted to make an adult film. But how could I do that?” He looked up at a window with a view of the street. “I mean, come on. People can see in here.
“Another time,” he said, “an organisation brought some children who had two weeks to live. Seeing Santa was their last wish.” The jolliness faded from his eyes. He stared down at his 90cm-long beard.
Before I said goodbye to Santa, I asked him about the complaints, like the ones I had heard from Tähtivaara, the law student, that the town was overrun by tourists.
“The people who benefit are happy,” Santa said. “Those who don’t – they’re jealous.”
“Out of control”
Santa Claus Village has grown into a sprawling operation, encompassing seven hotels, more than 20 restaurants and endless souvenir shops, their windows dripping with condensation from the crowds inside. Some stores are run by “elves” in pointy red hats who sell Santa socks, canned reindeer meat, reindeer pelts, garish northern lights jackets and cheese slicers made from antlers.
I saw Santas working in at least two different locations. According to the village’s operations chief, they are trained to carry on small talk in 20 languages. To meet them was free, but a photo cost €40 ($77). Certificates for crossing the Arctic Circle started at €5 (laminating and gold trim extra).
It was a drizzly Sunday. Buses were idling at the entrance to the village, discharging smoky diesel fumes and streams of tourists in matching snowmobile suits. I saw more adults than kids. The place was mobbed.
Where all these people stay is becoming an issue. Taina Torvela, a retired advertising executive, has been leading the charge against what she sees as Airbnb’s abuses in the city. Years ago, she did marketing for the Christmas Land project, which promoted Santa’s roots in Lapland, but now she says it has grown “too commercial”. We sat in the basement of her four-storey apartment building at a table she had laid with cookies and cranberry juice.
Torvela said tourists renting apartments had spoiled the feeling of community and shaken the sense of safety in her building, which houses many families and retirees. Strangers stomp around at all hours, sometimes ringing the wrong doorbells. They buttonhole people in the hallways to ask about grocery stores and sightseeing. In one unit, there was a serious kitchen fire and, in another, prostitutes.
“It’s out of control,” she said.
Torvela and others are pushing for tighter regulation that will cut down on commercial Airbnb use in residential buildings like hers. The Finnish Government and municipalities like Rovaniemi are considering several proposals.
“I really love Santa Claus, too,” she told me. “But do you know the real story? He’s actually living in a very secret place, with no way for people to get there.”
She threw her head back and laughed.
While we were talking, a stocky young man walked in and motioned to me. He started to tell me there was another side to this. Torvela stood up, bristling, and stepped toward the guy.
“Go out,” she said.
The guy backed off but later helped connect me with Tuomas Alaoja, who grew up in Rovaniemi and now manages several Airbnbs. He also rents out his own apartment, crashing with his parents when he does. During the tourist season, he can get €500 ($960) a night for his one-bedroom unit. Three nights at that rate cover his mortgage and other expenses for the month.
“I already have bookings for next year,” he told me.
The numbers are so good that investors are scooping up Rovaniemi’s limited housing stock to convert into Airbnbs. The city now has about as many beds through Airbnb and other rental sites as it does through its handful of big hotels. That means Airbnb keeps the local tourism machine chugging – whether the locals like it or not.
This tension between short-term renters and permanent residents is bubbling up all over the world, in hot spots like Venice, Italy; Bali and Machu Picchu. The surge of post-pandemic tourism is changing the character of these places, making them less pleasant and more expensive for those who live there. In Barcelona, Spain, locals are attacking tourists with squirt guns.
That’s what I kept hearing in Rovaniemi, from Torvela and many others: We don’t want to be Barcelona.
In mid-March, Torvela, dressed in a red overcoat and fuzzy boots, led about 70 protesters crunching along Rovaniemi’s snowy streets and hoisting signs that read “Dear Santa, I Want a Home”. The demonstration ended at the Santa Claus Hotel, one of the city’s more venerable establishments.
Tähtivaara, the student, spoke at a meeting afterward. She was balanced. She said tourism was important to Rovaniemi and brought in jobs.
But she was concerned about the housing crunch for students. Rovaniemi is a college town, with two universities and more than 10,000 students. Rents had doubled in the past few years, and even students fortunate enough to find a place near campus were sometimes kicked out during the tourist season. Tähtivaara was recently elected chair of the student union of the University of Lapland, so she had collected a lot of complaints.
“Tourism isn’t bad, and short-term rental isn’t bad,” she said. “It’s just the growth has to be controlled.”
Sightseeing sprawl
The tourist invasion has tentacles. I followed a two-lane highway lined by tall, thin pine trees 30 minutes north, to where Anita Lallo, a retired art teacher, lives on a remote lake.
About six years ago, northern lights “safari” companies discovered this spot. Convoys of minibuses and cars poured in late at night, gouging her grass, and tourists built fires on the frozen lake and slammed car doors at 3 or 4am. The city eventually put up a sign saying tourist groups were banned, but it was wood, and someone burned it down. The new one is metal.
This is not an easy place to find. Her road has just two houses on it and thus no light pollution. Lallo said that one night, when some tourists were camped on the frozen lake, she crept out of her house and asked them who had tipped them off about the area.
“Someone at Santa’s village,” the tourist said. Lallo didn’t bother to go there and complain, she said, because she didn’t know which elf had provided the information.
My last stop was a family-owned reindeer farm not far from town.
Reindeer, as Rovaniemi’s layout testifies, are an important piece of local culture. Every year, Lapland holds reindeer races. At the same time, their meat is a delicacy, and Lapland’s herders mark their flocks with special notches to the ears and then let them roam the forests and hills freely.
I could smell something fresh and savoury cooking in Ari Maununiemi’s kitchen when I arrived.
Maununiemi was hunched over a plate, attacking some dark, disk-shaped food on his plate.
I introduced myself and asked, “What are you eating?”
“Reindeer blood pancakes,” he grunted back. “Want some?”
They were moist, dense and good. I could taste the iron from the reindeer blood that gave them their deep maroon colour. I asked for some more – with extra butter.
Maununiemi’s family has herded reindeer for more than 200 years, and he still slaughters them for meat. He also traps foxes, which his wife turns into hats. But he has steadily expanded his reindeer ranch into a highly successful tourist operation with sleigh rides; ice fishing; a beautiful, cosy log cabin restaurant; and the issuance of reindeer driving licences.
As he showed me around, stopping to feed his reindeer clumps of lichen, he explained his philosophy.
“I live from tourism, but there’s a limit,” he said. A neighbour wants to build dozens of tourist cabins in the woods, and he’s against it.
He spoke of the pine trees, the fresh air, the fresh meat and the nearby lake, beautiful in the depths of winter and the nightless summers.
Maununiemi said he had never been on an aeroplane.
“Why would I need to go anywhere?” he asked. “I’m already here.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jeffrey Gettleman
Photographs by: Jim Huylebroek
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