page_title: Kiruna
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: Kiruna / History / Early history
caption_attribution_description: English: This photo was taken in Kiruna of Sweden.日本語: この写真はスウェーデンのキルナで撮影されました。
context_page_description: Kiruna is the northernmost town in Sweden, situated in the province of Lapland. It had 17,002 inhabitants in 2016 and is the seat of Kiruna Municipality in Norrbotten County.
  Esrange Space Center was established in Kiruna in the 1960s. Also in Kiruna are the Institute of Space Physics and Luleå University of Technology's Department of Space Science.
context_section_description: Before the design for the settlement had been accepted, houses were built in a disorganized manner with illegal slums similar to those in the other mining town, Malmberget, 80 kilometres (50 mi) south of Kiruna. Also, provisional buildings served as a church, a school, a hospital, a hotel and a police station. However, official residences were built at a high pace, and when the king opened the railway in 1903, all illegal residences and most other provisional buildings had been demolished and replaced. The very first building, B:1, is preserved and can be seen at Hjalmar Lundbohmsgården. In 1899, 18 people were registered as living in soon-to-be Kiruna.
  This increased to 222 in 1900, 7,438 in 1910 and 12,884 in 1930.
  The residences did not fully keep up with this rapid growth; by 1910, there were 1,877 official rooms and some unrecognised residences, which meant that an average of three to four people lived in a single room; this density decreased steadily during the decades to follow. Kiruna became a municipalsamhälle (a community within a municipality) in 1908. This caused unhappiness in local organisations, such as Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara Arbetareförening, that had hoped for status as köping, which would have kept more of the mining income inside the locality. In return, the mining company LKAB paid for a hospital, fire station, sewage, roads, a church (opened 1912) and the priest's home.
  In April 1907, a tram began operation in Kiruna, the northernmost in the world. This meant miners would no longer have to walk several kilometres through the sub-arctic cold, nor would they need to climb a hundred meters up the mining hill. The network consisted of three lines: bergbanan (funicular), stadsspårvägen (city tramway) and gruvspårvägen (mine tramway). The funicular closed in 1955 after a road up the mine was built 1949. The city line had a maximum length of 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) and was unique due to the 1-meter gauge, double windows and heated wagons. It closed in 1958 after gradually being replaced by buses. Between 1941 and 1964, a tram was used inside the mine, with wagons bought from closed tramlines throughout Sweden.
  The iron ore industry was good in the early 20th century. Before the start of the work, Hjalmar Lundbohm worried whether the Kiruna winter would allow for working outside at all, but despite early research into underground mining, mountaintop removal mining was the primary method in the early years. Mechanisation was attempted early using steam powered excavators, but the cold climate led to considerable difficulties and only when electrical machinery became available in the 1910s, significant mechanisation was achieved. The peak of Kiirunavaara, Statsrådet, was 247.7 metres (813 ft) above Luossajärvi until it was spectacularly blown off in 1910.
  A general strike hit Sweden in 1909 and Kiruna was no exception. Hoping for a better future, thousands of people left Kiruna, including a group of 500 inhabitants emigrating to Brazil. Most of them returned, disappointed that life in Latin America was not what they had hoped it to be, Hjalmar Lundbohm personally lent money for the trip home to some of the emigrants.
  During World War I, iron ore production dropped to the lowest level in LKAB's history, and when exports increased again, a successful three-month strike in 1920 led to a 20% increase in salaries for the miners. Production dropped to a minimum in 1922 and a three-day work week was introduced, but during the fabulous twenties, it increased to a record nine million tonnes in 1927.
  In 1921, mining started at Kiruna's other hill, Luossavaara. However, the total amount of ore that could be mined in open pit mining here was small compared to Kiirunavaara, and LKAB preferred to concentrate resources in one place. Nevertheless, mining here continued until 1974 and later it became a research mine. While 19th-century mining in Kiruna had focused on Luossavaara the large-scale operation of LKAB focused on the Kiruna ore proper because it was both larger and not subject to legal restrictions that mandate Luoss
caption: Aurora taken from the suburb of Kiruna
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