About
One guide.
Two places.
No script.
ScandiXplore isn't a company with a fleet of guides reading from the same handbook. It's Jorge — Portuguese, based in Finnish Lapland since 2024, and the person actually driving the van or walking the route on every single tour.
How this started
I spent over 15 years living in the UK before moving to Finland in 2020, then to Rovaniemi in 2024. Somewhere in between, photography stopped being a hobby and became the thing I actually do for a living — Northern Lights, portraits, food, travel work, shot for stock agencies and for people who just wanted a good photo of themselves under the aurora.
ScandiXplore grew out of that directly. I got tired of watching operators promise the Northern Lights and deliver a faint smudge that only shows up on a long camera exposure — technically true, honestly misleading. So the tours I run are built around a simpler standard: if you can't see it standing there, we don't call it a sighting.
Porto came from the other direction — it's where I'm from, and where I still go back to guide food, wine, and history tours between aurora seasons. Same person, same standard, different hemisphere of the year.
What actually makes this different
Not "authentic" or "meaningful" — those words don't mean anything until you explain the mechanics. So here's what small and local actually change in practice:
- The route isn't fixed. Aurora hunts are built the same night around real cloud cover and KP index data, not a route drawn in advance. If the sky is clearer 150km away, that's where we go.
- The group is capped, for real. Six guests in Lapland, eight in Porto — one vehicle or one small walking group, not a coach with a rotating roster of guides.
- I guide in English, Portuguese, and Spanish natively — not translated through a script, not handed off to whoever's free that night.
- You get real photos, shot by someone who does this professionally, not a phone snap from whoever's holding the group's camera.
Who's actually behind this
Just me, plus a small number of trusted local partners for tours I can't personally run every night of the season — always briefed to the same standard, never a random subcontractor. If you book with ScandiXplore, you're booking with someone who lives in the place you're visiting, not a booking platform with a local-sounding name.
In the Field
Both places.
