Kiirunavaara ( Northern Sami: ''Gironvárri'',

Meänkieli (literally 'our language') is a group of distinct Finnish language, Finnish dialects or a Finnic languages, Finnic language spoken in the northernmost part of Sweden along the valley of the Torne River. Its status as an independent language is d ...

: ''Kierunavaara'') is a mountain situated in Kiruna Municipality in

Norrbotten County Norrbotten County ( sv, Norrbottens län; se, Norrbottena leatna, fi, Norrbottenin lääni) is the northernmost county or '' län'' of Sweden. It is also the largest county by land area, almost a quarter of Sweden's total area. It shares border ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

. It contains one of the largest and richest bodies of

iron ore Iron ores are rocks and minerals from which metallic iron can be economically extracted. The ores are usually rich in iron oxides and vary in color from dark grey, bright yellow, or deep purple to rusty red. The iron is usually found in the fo ...

in the world.

History

The presence of iron in the area was known already in the mid-17th century, but at this early time communication lines to this northerly region were quite insufficient to permit any major exploitation. Only with the construction of the Iron Ore Line railway at the end of the 19th century, which connected the ports of Narvik on the Norwegian Sea and

Luleå Luleå ( , , locally ; smj, Luleju; fi, Luulaja) is a city on the coast of northern Sweden, and the capital of Norrbotten County, the northernmost county in Sweden. Luleå has 48,728 inhabitants in its urban core (2018) and is the seat of Lu ...

on the Baltic Sea, did commercial mining become a realistic proposition. The Swedish mining company LKAB (''Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Aktiebolag'') has been mining the mountain since the beginning of the 20th century. The mining area around

Kiruna (; se, Giron ; fi, Kiiruna ) is the northernmost Stad (Sweden), city in Sweden, situated in the province of Lapland, Sweden, Lapland. It had 17,002 inhabitants in 2016 and is the seat of Kiruna Municipality (population: 23,167 in 2016) in Norr ...

and Malmberget, together with the iron port and steelworks at

, made

one of the first, and most prominent, regions of heavy industry in Sweden. The wider region has remained at the forefront of mining and steel smelting and alloying technology.

References

Kiruna Underground mines in Sweden Mountains of Norrbotten County {{Norrbotten-geo-stub

History

See also

References