I would agree that the Stora Kopperberg mine (Great Copper Mountain) at Falun
is well worth a visit. They have tours underground - my wife and I went in about 1998.
A booklet we bought there at the time quotes someone as saying "He who has not
seen the Great Copper Mountain has not seen Sweden". Now, of course, it is an
old open pit underlain by an extensive, now worked-out, underground mine.
If you are in Stockholm, there is a museum which has the share certificate of
some bishop who bought a one-eighth share in the company in 1288 - when at
Mining Magazine we used to receive annual reports of the Stora Kopparberg company
(now mainly dealing in timber - if you go underground and see some of the timbering
they used, you can see why they also needed to own large forests), and the reports
always stated, with some reason, that Stora "is probably the oldest joint-stock
company in the world".
Another Swedish mine I have been down several times is the Kiruna iron ore mine, but
that is up in the far north. It is the only mine I have been to where I was taken underground
from daylight in a Mercedes saloon car and driven to within 100 meters of a production
stope about 400 meters below surface, travelling all the way on a tarmac road. They said
that having excellent road surfaces saved so much money in minimising tyre damage to
heavy trucks, that it was well worth doing! On my third visit, they apologised that all their
PR people were at a conference in Stockholm, so my guide was a woman planning-office
engineer who had been born and brought up in the town and had been a master driller
underground (her grandfather had helped build the railway from Luleo, and her dad had
worked in the mine during the period when it made the transition from being an open pit
to going underground). Being a practical sort of person, she (unlike some of the PR people
one sometimes got landed with) told me what mistakes they had made, and how they had
corrected them - just what I wanted to know to make a good article about the mine which
might be of help to others!
It could be that Kiruna has facilites for underground trips for visitors - worth checking out,
if you are happy to go that far north.
Tony Brewis
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