VIDEO: Massive Church Heads Down The Road to Escape Mine Subsidence
Date Posted: August 19, 2025
Posted In: Drone, Featured,
From Reuters: Sweden’s landmark Kiruna Church will begin a two-day trip to a new home on Tuesday (Aug. 19th), inching down an Arctic road to save its wooden walls from ground subsidence and the expansion of the world’s largest underground iron ore mine.
Workers have already jacked up the 600-ton, 113-year-old church from its foundations and hefted it onto a specially built trailer – part of a 30-year project to relocate thousands of people and buildings from the Lapland city.
Mine-operator LKAB has spent the last year widening the road for the journey which will take the red-painted church – one of Sweden’s largest wooden structures, often voted its most beautiful – 5km (3 miles) down a winding route to a brand new Kiruna city centre.
“The City’s Soul”
The journey will save the church, but take it from the site where it has stood for more than a century.
“The church is Kiruna’s soul in some way, and in some way it’s a safe place,” Lena Tjarnberg, the vicar of Kiruna, said.
“For me, it’s like a day of joy. But I think people also feel sad because we have to leave this place.”
For many of the region’s indigenous Sami community, which has herded reindeer there for thousands of years, the feelings are less mixed. The move is a reminder of much wider changes brought on by the expansion of mining.