Searching for Santa Claus

Santa lives at the North Pole, right? Don't say that to the people of Rovaniemi in northern Finland

- BY Katherine LaGrave FROM AFAR

The visit was part of a two-week journey across Finland in November 2021. I was on a mission to find the man who seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once: Santa Claus.

In 1927, Finnish radio host Markus Rautio announced that Santa Claus’s home had been “located” on Korvatunturi, a mountain in Lapland, Finland’s northernmost region. From there, Rautio suggested, Santa could hear even the quietest whispers carried by the north wind.

Niilo Tarvajärvi, another renowned radio and television personality, raised the idea of capitalizing on the Santa Claus mythology in the 1960s after visiting Disneyland in the United States, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that efforts gained any real momentum. That’s when the Finnish Tourist Board launched a new tourism strategy for Lapland, which despite its many assets—one of Europe’s few remaining untouched wilderness areas; the strong culture of the region’s native Sámi population—had not been able to attract enough tourists. The solution? Make Lapland the home of Santa Claus.

Korvatunturi was deemed too remote, so authorities focussed their efforts on Rovaniemi, Lapland’s capital, which sits 364 kilometers to the southwest, just below the Arctic Circle. 90 per cent of Rovaniemi had been destroyed during World War II, but in 1945, Alvar Aalto, the country’s greatest architect, started rebuilding it—designing the city in the shape of a reindeer head and antlers.

In 1984, the governor of Lapland declared the province ‘Santa Claus Land’. A Concorde jet began making Christmas flights from London to Rovaniemi’s airport—rebranded as ‘Santa’s Official Home Airport’.