Moving to a new house is a big job. Now imagine moving an entire downtown: the shops, the homes, city hall, and a beloved old church, all shifted a couple of miles down the road. In the far north of Sweden, a whole town is doing exactly that.
The short answer: Kiruna sits right next to an enormous iron ore mine, and the mining deep underground is making the ground beneath the old town center sink. In 2004, officials decided the center would have to be relocated. The move began in 2014, the new center is about 1.9 miles to the east, and the plan stretches all the way to the year 2100. Some buildings are being moved, while others are being torn down and replaced.
A Town Built for a Mine
Kiruna is Sweden's northernmost city, about 90 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the province of Lapland. It was built around 1900 for one reason: the iron ore inside the nearby mountains. The local Sámi people knew about the ore centuries before the town existed.
Getting the ore out was the hard part. The area was remote and the climate was harsh, so mining only took off once a railway arrived. The line reached Kiruna in 1899 and was later connected to the ice-free coast of Norway.
The town itself was planned with unusual care. Architects built it on a hill and laid out the streets to take the weather into account. As a result, its winters are much milder than in nearby areas, and the wind is kept down.
The Mine That Undermined It
The Kiruna mine is owned by LKAB, a large state-owned Swedish mining company. Its ore body is about 2.5 miles long and reaches down as far as 1.2 miles. Since mining began there in 1898, it has produced more than 950 million tonnes of ore.
Digging that much out of the earth has consequences. The ground above slowly subsides, and the old town center sits right in the way. The mining is powerful enough to shake things up, too. In May 2020, an earthquake of about magnitude 4.9 was triggered by activity in the mine.
Choosing a New Home
Deciding where to put a town took years. A spot to the northwest was proposed in 2007, but in 2010 the city council chose to move eastward instead. An international design competition followed, and the winning plan imagines a denser downtown with more attention to green space, pedestrians, and public transit.
Since 2013, Danish photographer Klaus Thymann has returned again and again to document the move, shooting from the exact same GPS-tagged spots to show how the landscape changes over time.
Moving a Church in One Piece
The most dramatic moment came in August 2025. Kiruna Church, built between 1909 and 1912, is one of the largest wooden buildings in Sweden. In a 2001 nationwide poll, it was voted the country's most popular building from before 1950.
Rather than take it apart, the town moved the 113-year-old church whole to avoid damaging it. Over two days, it traveled about 3.1 miles east to its new neighborhood.
So while most of us struggle to move a couch, Kiruna is moving a city, one building at a time. It's a slow, careful journey that will outlast many of the people who started it.
