File photo of cold weather in Sweden.
© Fotograferna Holmberg/TTFile photo of cold weather in Sweden.
Temperatures fell below freezing across Sweden on Monday, but no place was as cold as the remote settlement of Naimakka, where the mercury plummeted to its coldest level this season.

"It's continuing to creep down. At noon it was down to -42.7C," Emma Härenstam, a meteorologist at Sweden's national weather agency SMHI, told the TT news agency. Later in the afternoon temperatures fell to -43.8C in Naimakka, according to SMHI's preliminary data.

SMHI predicts that temperatures will remain low on Monday and Tuesday, followed by milder weather from Wednesday onwards, both in Naimakka and the rest of Sweden.

Naimakka often features in weather articles as one of the coldest places in Sweden in winter. It is located right on the Finnish border in the far north of Sweden and can only be reached via Finland. According to address website Ratsit, it is home to only two people.

But -43.8C is still a far cry from Sweden's all-time cold records. On February 2nd 1966 one of SMHI's weather stations measured -52.6C in Vuoggatjålme in the Lapland mountains. However, it is debated whether it was correctly recorded, so Sweden usually uses the runner-up, -48.9C at Hemavaan on December 30th 1978, as its official cold record. Maybe Naimakka's got a chance at beating that after all.