The world’s biggest iron ore tunnel mine is about to swallow the Swedish city of Kiruna. The company’s answer? Move the city

The mine, Kiirunavaara, is the reason this Swedish town of roughly 20,000 people deep in northern Lapland exists at all. It is one the world’s largest underground iron ore mines, and it dominates both economically and visually, the smokestacks sending up twin plumes of black smoke from the denuded mountain like a kind of Arctic Mordor.

Over a century, the miners have tunnelled so deep into the earth – 2km at some points – that they have now literally undermined the town. The caverns are causing subsidence, weakening the structure of the buildings, and opening a great crack in the earth itself, which grows wider and several metres closer to the city every year. Kiruna is about to be swallowed by the very mine that gave it life.

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Kiruna’s new City Hall, lower right, by Henning Larsen architects, sits about 3km from the world’s biggest iron mine, top left
Kiruna’s new City Hall, lower right, by Henning Larsen architects, sits about 3km from the world’s biggest iron mine, top left - A sense of betrayal is rooted in the Sami experience in Kiruna; several Sami told me versions of an apocryphal story about a Sami man discovering a special heavy stone, and being tricked by a Swedish prospector into revealing the location of the iron ore deposits. The company seems exasperated by the issue. “They have their interest in this land and we have ours,” says Mäkitaavola. “So it’s a problem. It’s not easy.” Stefan Sydberg, Kiruna’s deputy mayor, acknowledges the Sami people’s interests must be respected. “But moving the city centre to this area has the least impact, because this is an old industrial area. There haven’t been any reindeer in this area since before the city transformation. “We can’t just sit and say we can’t do anything because we have the reindeer herders. We have to evolve as a city. Because they prosper from that as well.” © Peter Rosén/LapplandMedia