Qualla: Sulitjelma Hotel

Sulitjelma Hotel: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This building did not start out here. It began life as a mining director's residence at Badderen, on the Badderfjord in Kvænangen, nearly 400 kilometres north up the coast of Arctic Norway. When Sulitjelma needed a house grand enough for the man running the largest mining company in the country, nobody built one. They dismantled the Badderen villa board by board, moved the whole thing south, and reassembled it at Furulund among the officials' houses above the lake. Sources disagree on whether the work finished in 1903 or 1906. Either way, the most impressive structure in a company town arrived secondhand, in pieces, by sea.

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Sulitjelma Hotel: The House on the Right Side of the Valley

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Furulund was where Sulitjelma Aktiebolag housed the people who gave orders. The villa stood there with its verandas and its garden trees, photographed in the 1920s looking every inch a bourgeois home in a landscape that offered nothing bourgeois at all. A few hundred metres away,...

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Sulitjelma Hotel: Fifty Beds

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The mines wound down slowly and then all at once. Copper prices collapsed in 1975, the state took the operation over in 1983, and in 1982 — with the industry visibly failing — the old director's residence was converted into a hotel with fifty beds. A renovation and extension in 1...

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Sulitjelma Hotel: Room for Strangers

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In early summer 2015 the hotel went up for sale, and that autumn came the announcement that it would be used as a reception centre for people fleeing the war in Syria. The proposal drew a loud local debate — the figure discussed was around 150 arrivals in a settlement of roughly ...

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Sulitjelma Hotel: Open Again

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In autumn 2019 the building changed hands once more, bought by Salten Hotell AS with the intention of putting guests back in the rooms, and hotel operations resumed in early 2020. It runs today as Sulitjelma Hotell with somewhere in the region of fifty rooms, a restaurant and bar...

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