Falun Mine
Falun och Kopparbergslagen
Interesting facts
- The element selenium was discovered in 1817 by Jöns Jacob Berzelius and Johan Gottlieb Gahn in pyrite from the mine used to make sulphuric acid.
- Tantalum was first identified in 1802 by Anders Ekeberg, partly in mineral samples that came from Falun.
- Berzelius named a supposed new element thorium in 1815 from a Falun mineral; it proved to be yttrium phosphate, so he reused the name for real thorium in 1829.
- For about seven centuries miners split the ore with fire-setting: fires burned overnight, the hot rock cracked, and a working face advanced roughly a metre a month.
- The mine is thought to contain more than 4,000 shafts, drifts and chambers, each with its own name; in one, the rock wall serves as a guestbook for royal visitors.
- In the 17th century the mine employed around 1,000 workers, making it the largest workplace in Sweden.
- After years on display, Fet-Mats was buried in 1749, but his bones were later boxed and forgotten in the church attic until a final burial in 1934.
- The mining company's modern descendant, Stora Enso, is often described as the oldest joint-stock company still in business.
- Gold was found in the mine in 1881, setting off a brief local gold rush.
- In the early 1700s the inventor Christopher Polhem equipped the mine with new hoisting machinery of his own design.
Why it is worth it
For roughly a thousand years men dug copper out of the Great Copper Mountain at Falun, in the Swedish province of Dalarna. Archaeology suggests mining began around the year 1000, it was certainly under way by 1080, and the first written record dates from 1288. At its height, around 1650, the mine yielded more than 3,000 tonnes of copper a year, and Sweden supplied some two-thirds of the copper Europe needed; the wealth of Falun helped to pay for the country's age as a great power. A charter of 1347 organised the miners into a company in which shares followed ownership of the smelters, an arrangement often described as a forerunner of the modern joint-stock company. Commercial mining ended only on 8 December 1992.
The centrepiece of the site is the Great Pit, Stora Stöten. Centuries of tunnelling left the mountain riddled with chambers, and on Midsummer's Eve 1687 the whole honeycomb gave way. Because it was a holiday no one was underground. What remained is a vast crater about 95 metres deep and some 1.6 kilometres around, its walls streaked in ochre, rust and grey where the ore-bearing rock is exposed. Standing on the rim and looking down into it, it is easy to understand Carl Linnaeus, who visited in the eighteenth century and called the mine one of the great wonders of Sweden but as horrible as hell itself, full of soot, heat, dust and corrosive vapour.
The mine left another legacy that colours the whole Swedish countryside. As copper output declined in the eighteenth century, the company began producing in earnest a red pigment from the mine's by-products: Falu red, the paint of countless barns, cottages and farmhouses across Scandinavia. The mine also has its strangest story: in 1719 miners found, in a long-flooded passage, the body of a young man preserved by the mineral-laden water. He was identified by his former fiancée as Mats Israelsson, remembered as Fet-Mats, who had disappeared some forty years before.
Since 2001 the mine has been the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage Site Mining Area of the Great Copper Mountain in Falun, which also takes in the historic mining landscape around the town. A museum occupies an administrative building of the 1770s, and guided tours lead down through old galleries to 67 metres below ground, through passages and caverns cut by generations of miners.
Getting there
The mine lies a few hundred metres from the centre of Falun. The nearest airport is Dala Airport (BLE) at Borlänge, about 21 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Falun Mine was a mine in Falun, Sweden, that operated for a millennium from the 10th century to 1992. It produced as much as two-thirds of Europe's copper needs and helped fund many of Sweden's wars in the 17th century. Technological developments at the mine had a profound influence on mining globally for two centuries. The mine is now a museum and in 2001 was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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