"Incredible views, breathtaking nature and first-class service." The Arctic Resort in Finnish Lapland promises an experience designed to captivate tourists seeking luxury and wide-open spaces. Its main selling point? The chance to admire the Northern Lights from rooms built in the style of glass igloos.

Built between 2019 and 2021 in the municipality of Utsjoki, nestled deep in a birch forest, the hotel overlooks the Teno River, which marks the border between Finland and Norway. This is the northernmost Finnish construction identified by Le Monde and its partners, the Guardian (United Kingdom) and online publication Long Play (Finland), as part of the European collaborative investigation "Green to Grey."

Under the aegis of the Arena for Journalism in Europe network, 41 journalists and scientists from 11 European countries scrutinized millions of pixels in search of lost natural areas. Thanks to the unprecedented precision of satellite imagery processed by a machine learning model developed by scientist Zander Venter of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research and Norwegian media outlet NRK, it was possible to identify a multitude of modest-sized buildings that have appeared in Lapland in recent years. These include cabins, vacation homes and glass domes – structures that usually go unnoticed in calculations of land take in Europe.

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