Santa Village - is a theme park located about 8 km from Rovaniemi in Finland. Among the sights of the park are Santa Claus' office and post office, where letters from children from all over the world come every year.
There are many sights in the park, all about Santa Claus and Lapland region, and on the floor is a symbolic engraved exact point where, according to the latitude coordinates, the Arctic Circle is located.
Inside the cave, near the village of Santa Claus, there is Santa Park, another amusement park.
In the postwar period, the city of Rovaniemi and Lapland were the first to receive aid from UNRRA, a humanitarian organization that was the predecessor of UNISEF . The birth of the Polar Circle hut and tourism services is also associated with the help of Unicef. Eleanor Roosevelt, known as "the soul of UNRRA", paid a surprise visit to Rovaniemi in 1950. As part of the welcoming ceremony, the "Polar Circle" hut was built in a few weeks.
When the wife of the U.S. president, known for her humanitarian work, suddenly came to Rovaniemi in 1950 to learn about the post-war reconstruction of Lapland and Rovaniemi, Uuno Hannula, prefect of the time, organized the event. Hannula was assisted by Mayor Laurie Kayalainen, who, with the help of his employees, received a piece of land on the national road No. 4, which leads north, as a gift from Professor Amey Karinen, to build housing for visitors. At that time it was decided to organize a reception ceremony here, north of the Arctic Circle.
The idea arose because twenty years earlier Colonel Oiva G. Willamo had built a post in the same area where tourists could stop and take pictures. The exact location of the pole and the new hut destroyed during the war has not been determined based on accurate scientific measurements. The first one was built around the place where the Arctic Circle crossed the above-mentioned road and the second one on newly acquired land, although later calculations showed that it was 108 metres south.
The Polar Circle hut, which took only a week to build, was designed in a hurry by the architect Ferdinand Salokangas and built by experienced Yarl Sandquist woodworkers directly from logs and assembled from the Ounasjoki River. According to the instructions, so much was used that "there was room in the hut for a big bus with people". There was not much time left: the first logs were collected from the river on Saturday, and the following Saturday, when Mrs. Roosevelt's plane landed at the airport, the hut's front door was installed.
Finally, on Sunday, May 11, 1950, the hut was ready to receive an important guest. The reception ceremony was attended by many Rovaniemi residents, who then got used to the many important guests coming from far away. The event was very important for tourism in the area, as the first major attraction was created, which attracted more and more visitors to the area.
The "Polar Circle" hut is a tourist center in Rovaniemi, which has become an international tourism center. Every year it attracts more and more visitors, who are trying to offer better services. Over the years, more tourist attractions have appeared in the hut area.
