A famous Swedish church has begun its move to a new home, inching five kilometres down an Arctic road to make way for the expansion of the world’s largest underground iron ore mine.

Earlier this week, workers jacked up the 600-tonne, 113-year-old Kiruna Church from its foundations and hefted it onto a specially built trailer.

“So this is happening right now here in Kiruna, Sweden. We’re moving the massive wooden church … to its new home in our new town. History being made,” local Mia Stålnacke wrote on X as the move began on Tuesday (local time).

It is part of a 30-year project to relocate thousands of people and buildings from the Lapland city of Kiruna.

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 and often voted its most beautiful, down a winding route to a brand new Kiruna city centre.

The journey will save the church, but take it from the site where it has stood for more than a century.

“The church is Kiruna’s soul in some way, and in some way it’s a safe place,” Lena Tjarnberg, the vicar of Kiruna, said.

“For me, it’s like a day of joy. But I think people also feel sad because we have to leave this place.”

For many of the region’s indigenous Sami community, which has herded reindeer there for thousands of years, the move is a reminder of much wider changes brought on by the expansion of mining.

“This area is traditional Sami land,” Lars-Marcus Kuhmunen, chair of the local Gabna Sami community, said.

“This area was grazing land and also a land where the calves of the reindeer were born.”

If plans for another nearby mine go ahead after the move, that would cut the path from the reindeer’s summer and winter pastures, making herding “impossible” in the future, he said.

“Fifty years ago, my great-grandfather said that the mine was going to eat up our way of life, our reindeer herding. And he was right.”

The church is just one small part of the relocation project.

LKAB said about 3000 homes and about 6000 people needed to move.

Some public and commercial buildings are being torn down, while others, like the church, are being moved in one piece. More buildings are being dismantled and rebuilt around the new city centre.

Hundreds of new homes, shops and a new city hall have also been constructed.

The shift should allow LKAB, which produces 80 per cent of the iron ore mined in Europe, to extend its operation at Kiruna for decades.

The state-owned operator has brought up about two billion tonnes of ore since the 1890s, mainly from the Kiruna mine.

Mineral resources are estimated at another six billion tonnes in Kiruna and nearby Svappavaara and Malmberget.

LKAB is also planning the new mine next to the existing Kiruna site.

As well as iron ore, the proposed Per Geijer mine contains significant deposits of rare earth elements, a group of 17 metals critical to products from lasers to iPhones and green technology key to meeting Europe’s climate goals.

Europe, and much of the rest of the world, is almost completely dependent on China for the supply and processing of rare earths.

In March, the EU designated Per Geijer as a strategic project that could help speed up the process of getting the new mine into production.

Down the road, Kiruna’s new city centre is also taking shape.

“The church is … a statement or a symbol for this city transformation,” Mayor Mats Taaveniku told Reuters.

“We have 10 years left to move the rest of the city.”

-with AAP