A huge project is under way in Sweden to move the town of Kiruna about 3 kilometres (nearly 2 miles) east. Subsidence from the world’s biggest iron ore mine located nearby threatens to swallow up the town, which is situated in the Arctic north of the country. The move involves moving more than 20 buildings from the old town to the new location. Some will be completely dismantled and reconstructed. One of the buildings to be moved, the church, built in 1912 and designed to resemble a hut of the indigenous Sami people, was voted Sweden's most beautiful old building. The rest of the town is being built from scratch. New buildings include a town hall, the old one having been considered too expensive to move.

6th February 2023

Kiruna, with a population of 18,000 inhabitants, is located in the far north of Sweden, 200 kilometres (125 miles) above the Arctic Circle. It was built in the 1890s as home for workers at the nearby iron ore mine. The mine, run by Swedish state-owned company Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara (LKAB), is today the largest iron ore mine in the world, producing 80% of the EU’s supply.
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The mine is important to LKAB's contribution to Europe’s green industrial revolution in two ways. Firstly, it is now know to contain Europe's largest known deposit of rare earth elements, metals that are vital to produce electric car batteries and wind turbines. Secondly, the mine began producing "sponge" iron in 2021, by replacing its previous source of power, coal, with hydrogen produced from green electricity.

​​​​​​​Problems of subsidence in Kiruna—the sinking of the ground, along with buildings, roads etc. built on top of it—as a result of the extraction of vast amounts of ore from below have been known about since the 1970s. In recent years, cracks have started to appear in the hospital and a school is no longer safe for its students. The decision to move the town, which is being funded by the state-owned mine, was made in 2004. Work begun in 2007.
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In 2017 the old railway station was demolished and the town hall bell tower was moved to its new location. In 2021 the first homes in Kiruna's new town centre were occupied, with the official opening taking place in September 2022. In 2026, the entire 600-tonne wooden church will be loaded on to trailers and moved to a new spot near the local graveyard. The move is expected to be completely completed by 2035.

But Kiruna’s transformation has caused concern amongst some of the Sami people, who gave the town its name ("Kiruna" comes from the Sami word giron, meaning snow grouse). The relocation of the town along with an extension of the land to be mined may affect the migration routes of reindeer on which the Sami, a tradtional herdspeople, depend.