Kiruna ( a manly city?)

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In this post I will give some of my personal impressions on Kiruna.

It is Swedens northernmost town with a bit less than 20,000 inhabitants. Downtown is pretty small and there are not many tourist attractions.

Kiruna has a strange looking coat of arms....very manly place? The upper symbol also stands for iron...some explanation on the coat of arms can be found here...

Kiruna coat of arms. Made by Wikipedia user Marmelad published under CC BY-SA 2.5


The nicest building (in my opinion) is the Sami Church where the low-hanging midday sun gives you a nice view right now.

 

When driving around Kiruna you might also notice the rocket. ESA (European Space Agency) has a rocket launch base for MAXUS, a sounding rockets used to study microgravity (e.g. for physics or biology).


I am pretty sure, the main reason why Kiruna is so big is a large mine. It has created an artificial mountain and they even moved the town at some stage.

This makes Kiruna not really the most beautiful place in the region....to say the least 😉.
Mining mountain - like in Australian outback
Kiruna scenery - time to hit the road ;)
With the large mine comes infrastructure, with infrastructure comes light and with light comes light pollution. So the reason why I started my trip here is the fact that Kiruna is by far the brightest spot on the map in an island of darkness.

People here like to leave the lights on all day. Well I hope this is reducing as the days get longer. You can go skiing on an artificial (?) hill looking over the mine and transport hub......well I would do this elsewhere (if I would ski at all....) but for the locals its great I guess.

Ski area next to mine and mining railway station. Lights on all day.
Railway station of mine. Lights on all day.

I started my trip towards Narvik. The road neighbors the railway, the Ofotbanen mainly built to carry the iron towards Narvik (ice free harbor) in Norway. I read some time ago that one reason why Germany fought so hard in Norway was the access to Swedish (neutral country) iron from Kiruna. The trains are very long and as picturesque as the more legendary Siberian railway.
Ofoten line (Ofotbanen)



For a boring 1min video of an iron ore train click below ;)


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