The Falun copper mine

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

Nobody wrote down when mining began on the copper mountain at Falun. Archaeology puts the start at roughly the year 1000, with farmers gathering ore and smelting it for their own households. By the late thirteenth century nobles and merchants from Lübeck had taken over. The first document, from 1288, records the Bishop of Västerås trading an estate for an eighth share, and a charter of 1347 set up free miners who held shares in proportion to the smelters they owned. Stora Enso, the company descended from that arrangement, is often called the oldest joint-stock company still operating.

The method barely changed for seven hundred years. Miners lit fires against the rock at the end of a shift and let them burn through the night; by morning the stone was brittle enough to break with wedges and sledges, and a face advanced about a metre a month. Roasting the ore in open hearths left a poisonous smoke hanging over Falun for centuries. Carl Linnaeus visited and called the mine one of the great wonders of Sweden, and as horrible as hell itself.

In the seventeenth century the mine paid for Sweden's wars. At its height it met as much as two thirds of Europe's copper needs, the Privy Council called it the nation's treasury, and in 1650 it produced over 3,000 tonnes. By then the mountain was riddled with shafts and nobody had reckoned how much more it could take. Through the summer of 1687 the miners heard it groaning. On Midsummer's Eve the walls between the main workings gave way and a great part of the mine fell in, leaving the Great Pit, 95 metres deep and 1.6 kilometres round. Midsummer's Eve was one of only two days a year, with Christmas, when nobody worked, and not a single miner died.

In December 1719 miners broke into a flooded, long-abandoned shaft and found a man who looked freshly dead. Raised and put on display, he dried hard as wood, and Margaret Olsdotter recognised Mats Israelsson, her fiancé, who had vanished in 1677. Linnaeus saw that the body was not petrified, only soaked in vitriol, copper sulfate, and said it would decay once that evaporated. It did, but it stayed on show for thirty years and was finally buried in 1930. E. T. A. Hoffmann turned the find into a story, and Wagner drafted a libretto from it.

Copper gave way to iron, timber and Falu red paint, a short gold rush came in 1881, and the last shot was fired on 8 December 1992. The mine is a museum now, with tours underground, and a World Heritage Site since 2001.