Aurora Viewing Locations

Longyearbyen sits at 78°N on the Svalbard archipelago, making it the world's northernmost permanent settlement and one of the most extraordinary places on Earth to witness the aurora borealis.

Oslo is Norway's bustling capital, a city of 700,000 people where the Oslofjord meets forested hills, and where aurora sightings are exceptional rather than routine.

Bergen is Norway's second city, cradled between seven mountains and the Byfjord, famed worldwide for its colourful Bryggen wharf and as the gateway to the western fjords.

Trondheim is Norway's third city and one of its most underrated aurora destinations.

Tromsø sits at 69.

Alta is known as the aurora capital of the world.

The Lofoten Islands produce some of the world's most photographed northern lights.

Kiruna is the northernmost city in Sweden, perched at 67.

Abisko is a tiny settlement in the Swedish Lapland mountains, home to just a handful of permanent residents and surrounded entirely by Abisko National Park.

Stockholm, the Swedish capital spread across 14 islands where Lake Mälaren meets the Baltic Sea, is not a destination you'd typically find on an aurora travel itinerary — and for good reason.

Rovaniemi straddles the Arctic Circle at 66.

Levi is a contradiction that works: Finland's largest ski resort, perched at 531 m on the fells of Kittilä municipality, is simultaneously one of Europe's best aurora destinations.

Helsinki, Finland's design-forward capital at the southern tip of the country, is an aurora city only in the most optimistic sense — the kind of place where locals mark the calendar when a geomagnetic storm alert appears, not because sightings are routine, but because they're memorably rare.

Reykjavik is unlike any other capital city on Earth — a compact, architecturally distinctive city of 130,000 people on the southwestern tip of Iceland, sitting at 64.

Akureyri — Iceland's 'Capital of the North' — sits at the head of Eyjafjörður, the longest fjord in Iceland, surrounded by mountains that create one of the island's most sheltered and consistently liveable climates.

Whitehorse is the capital of Canada's Yukon Territory, a small city of 30,000 people in a river valley carved by the Yukon River through subarctic boreal forest and mountain terrain.

Yellowknife is the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories, a remote city of 20,000 people on the north shore of Great Slave Lake — one of the deepest lakes in the world.

Toronto, Canada's largest city and financial capital, was not built with aurora watching in mind.

Fairbanks, Alaska's second-largest city, occupies a wide interior valley at 64.

Anchorage is Alaska's largest city, home to nearly half the state's population, sitting on a low coastal plain between Chugach Mountains and Cook Inlet at 61.

Seattle, the Pacific Northwest's largest city at 47.

Scotland is the UK's premier northern lights destination — and during geomagnetic storms, it delivers.