Swedish church to be moved 5km to make way for mine

Sweden’s iconic Kiruna Church will start a two -day trip to a new house, which goes down five kilometers from the North Pole Road to save the world’s largest underground iron ore mine from the expansion of the world’s largest iron ore mine.

The workers have already removed the 600 -ton 113 -year -old church on their foundations and threw them into a specially built trailer.

It is part of a 30 -year -old project to replace thousands of people and buildings from Lapland City.

Mine operator LKAB, last year, one of the largest wooden structures of Sweden, the red -painted church expanding the journey to expand, usually the most beautiful, brand new red voted in the city center voted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9-tpyzrzfg

The journey will save the church, but will take it from where it stops for more than a century.

“The spirit of the Church Kiruna is somehow and a safe place in some way,” Vicar Lena Tjarnberg said.

“For me, it’s like a day of joy. But I think people are upset because we have to leave here.”

For many of the domestic Sami community, which has been in the region for thousands of years, a reminder of much wider changes brought about by the expansion of mining.

“This area is the traditional Sami lands, L Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen, President of the Local Gabna Sami Community.

“This area was a land of grazing soils and the calves of the reindeer.”

If the plans for another nearby mine continue after movement, it said that the reindeer would be “impossible ında in the future by cutting down the road from summer and winter pastures.

“Fifty years ago, my grandmother said that the mine would eat our lifestyle, the flock of reindeer. And was right.”

The church is only a small part of the displacement project.

LKAB says about 3000 houses and about 6000 people should move.

While some public and commercial buildings are destroyed, some are carried in one piece like the church.

Other buildings are being dismantled and rebuilt around the new city center.

Hundreds of new houses, shops and a new town hall were built.

The shift should allow LKAB, which produces 80 percent of mineral iron ore in Europe, to continue to extend the operation of Kiruna for decades.

Since the 1890s, the government company has brought about two billion tons of ore especially from the Kiruna mine.

Mineral resources are estimated to have six billion tons in the near Svappavaara and Malmberget.

LKAB is now planning the new mine next to the current Kiruna site.

In addition to the iron ore, the proposed geijer mine contains important deposits of rare earth elements, a group of 17 metals from lasers to iPhone and green technology switch, to meet Europe’s climate targets.

Most of Europe and the rest of the world are now almost entirely on China for the supply and processing of rare worlds.

In March of this year, the EU was a strategic project that could help to accelerate the process of entering the production of the new mine per geijer.

On the road, Kiruna’s new city center is also shaped.

Mayor Mats Taaveniku Reuters “Church… an expression or symbol for this city transformation,” he said.

“10 years left to carry the rest of the city.”