Sweden’s landmark Kiruna Church begins a two-day journey to a new home, inching down an Arctic road to save its wooden walls from ground subsidence and the expansion of the world’s largest underground iron ore mine.
Workers have jacked up the 600-tonne, 113-year-old church from its foundations and hefted it onto a specially built trailer – part of a 30-year project to relocate thousands of people and buildings from the city of Kiruna in the region of Lapland.
Mine operator LKAB has spent the past year widening the road for the journey, which will take the red-painted church – one of Sweden’s largest wooden structures, often voted its most beautiful – 5km (3 miles) down a winding route to a brand new Kiruna city centre.
The journey, which begins on Tuesday, will save the church but remov