The Falun copper mine

A thousand years of copper, and the red paint of Sweden

A mine that ran for a thousand years, from about the year 1000 until 1992, and at its height produced as much as two thirds of all the copper in Europe. It paid for Sweden’s wars in the 17th century and the technology worked out here shaped mining everywhere for two centuries after. It also gave the world a colour: Falu red, the iron-rich waste from the ore, is the paint on the wooden houses across Scandinavia. The Great Pit at the centre opened up in 1687 when centuries of workings collapsed into each other on a day when, by luck, almost nobody was underground. The mine is a museum now and a UNESCO World Heritage Site listed in 2001, and you can go down into it.