To Save This Historic Church, Workers Loaded It Onto Trailers and Rolled It Across Town. See How They Pulled It Off

The 672.4-ton church is one of several buildings that have been relocated in the Swedish town of Kiruna, where Europe’s largest underground iron ore mine is weakening the ground beneath the city center

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

August 25, 2025

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When mining operations endangered a 113-year-old Lutheran church in northern Sweden, officials decided to move it to another part of town. Between August 19 and 20, workers carefully loaded the Kiruna Church onto a wheeled platform and towed it three miles to a new home. The project took eight years of planning and cost more than $50 million.

Located in Kiruna, Sweden, the church weighs 672.4 tons and measures more than 130 feet long, according to a statement from LKAB, the mining company that moved the church. It was designed to resemble a hut made by the Indigenous Sámi community, and it’s one of the country’s largest wooden buildings.

“The church is Kiruna’s soul in some way, and in some way it’s a safe place,” Lena Tjärnberg, the vicar of Kiruna, tells Reuters’ Tom Little. The morning the building began its journey, Tjärnberg and Bishop Åsa Nyström blessed it. The bishop said that the church was now in God’s hands, according to Jonas Froberg of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

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Nestled in the mountains, Kiruna has always been a mining town. It was founded by geologist Hjalmar Lundbohm, LKAB’s first manager, in 1900. The company built the church as a gift to Kiruna’s residents, and it was inaugurated in 1912. Today, LKAB, which is owned by the Swedish government, boasts that the town is home to the largest underground iron ore mine in the world.

In 2004, the company told Kiruna officials that expansion of the mine was weakening the ground beneath the city center. Since then, around two dozen buildings have been moved, and a new city center has been established, report the New York Times’ Isabella Kwai and Isabella Anderson. The church originally stood atop a hill in the old center, and it’s now a fixture of the new one.

“We’ve been planning for the move for several years by working on an overall design for the church and the surrounding block,” says Mats Taaveniku, chairman of Kiruna’s municipal council, in the statement. “It’s a whole cultural environment that is being moved to a new location.”

The church’s slow crawl was live-streamed by LKAB, and thousands of people lined the streets to watch the building go by. A stage in the new town square hosted speakers, musical performances and other events during the so-called “Great Church Walk.”

“I’ve been waiting for this for a couple of years,” Johan Arveli, a Swedish man who traveled ten hours to watch the move, tells the Associated Press’ Stefanie Dazio, Malin Haarala and Pietro De Cristofaro. “I didn’t know what to expect. I had to see it because it’s a weird thing and a big thing.”

But not all spectators were happy about the move. Karin K. Niia, a leader of the Sámi village Gabna Sameby, tells the Guardian’s Miranda Bryant that the event was a “big show” meant to distract onlookers from the destruction of Kiruna’s Indigenous culture.

“It feels rather difficult to see the move of the church when I’m well aware of the consequences that mining activities have on everything around it: biodiversity, the air, pollution of water, reindeer and wildlife in general,” she says. “They have planned it all in order to get people’s attention, media attention on this state-owned company and their action to preserve the church as a symbol for the cultural heritage of Kiruna.”

The Sámi people have occupied the northern reaches of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia for thousands of years. Nomadic groups lived as hunter-gatherers before eventually becoming reindeer herders. Today, the Sámi population is around 80,000 to 100,000.

Sámi communities have long worried about LKAB’s mining operations, which have blocked traditional reindeer herding routes. “There is nowhere left for us to move,” Sámi herder Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen told the Sweden Herald last month. More mining would “mean that we would have to stop reindeer herding and that the Sámi culture here would cease.”

In the years before the big move, LKAB widened a road in Kiruna by nearly 50 feet and created a new intersection. Kiruna Church was closed for a year beforehand. Its altarpiece, a pastel painting created by Prince Eugen in 1912, was carefully packed, along with its 2,000-pipe organ.

LKAB’s Stefan Holmblad Johansson, who managed the church relocation project, tells the Guardian that workers dug out the ground around the building so they could slide metal beams underneath it. Two rows of trailers were then placed beneath the beams. Once loaded onto wheels, the church traveled at a speed of less than one mile per hour to its new location.

Though the most difficult work is finished, Kiruna Church won’t reopen until late 2026. Tjärnberg tells the AP that the final service in the building’s original location was bittersweet.

“The last day you go down the stairs and close the church door, you know it’s going to be several years before you can open it—and in a new place,” she says. “We don’t know how it’s going to feel to open the door.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.