The City

Kiruna is a spacious municipality with its 19,447 km2, actually equal to southern Sweden’s Skåne, Blekinge and Halland put together. A drive from Riksgränsen (at the Swedish-Norwegian border) in the west to Saivomuotka farthest to the east involves a trip covering 370 kilometers. Of the about 23,000 people living in this entire area, around 20,000 are living in the main city of Kiruna.

Stockholm lies about 1300 km away, and fortunately the communications with the rest of the world are exceptional. There are several daily flights between Stockholm and Kiruna (Norwegian, SAS and Höga Kusten) and daily train connections (SJ).

Kiruna is a relatively young city. The iron ore was discovered at the end of the 1800’s, which gave rise to a city in the middle of the Norrland wilderness. The mining company LKAB’s first managing director, Hjalmar Lundbohm, is considered to be the founder of Kiruna – a geologist with a passion for culture who didn’t want to just mine. He wanted to build a model city and hired the time’s foremost experts within architecture and community planning.

The impressions left by Lundbohm are still here. Kiruna was the first Swedish community with a city plan adapted to the climate, where, for example, the streets follow the terrain in an irregular pattern in order to curb the arctic winds. The city is also built on the side of a mountain, which means higher temperatures. The city’s central parts rarely experience temperatures below -20 C during the winter, despite that the official metrological station in Kiruna – Kiruna Airport – reports considerably lower temperatures.

According to SMHI (Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute), the average Kiruna winter stretches from the 10th of October until the end of April, but this depends of course on where you happen to be in our extensive community. At Riksgränsen, for example, the skiing season continues right up until Midsummer, in the latter part of June. The period for spying the midnight sun begins at the end of May, staying above the horizon for a stretch of about 50 days. As a complete contrast, we also have the midwinter darkness, when the sun doesn’t show itself for about a month.

As a part of Lundbohm’s legacy, there is the cultural life. Picasso was on display already in the 1960’s and Kiruna possesses some of Sweden’s finest art treasures with works by, among others, Anders Zorn, John Bauer and Edvard Munch. There are more than 400 active associations and clubs covering a wide spectrum of interests, and furthermore three distinct cultures – the Saami, the people of the Tornio Valley (Tornedalen) and the Swedish – living and prospering side by side.

The mining operations that set the foundation for the city are still the stable base. This has since been complemented with the space industry since 50 years back. Measuring instruments built in Kiruna orbit Mars and are on their way to Venus. In addition to the technical competence that has evolved from the mining and space operations, Kiruna is also the dominant tourist destination in northern Sweden. This is why there is a well-established professional tourist industry that can offer a virtually unlimited buffet of possible activities.

Kiruna is quite simply a thriving and well-running city in the middle of the sparsest of sparsely populated areas.