Kiruna: what is there while the town moves

The rows that decide a Kiruna trip

Two of the rows below are blank, and the blanks are the point. Sweden does not publish what Finland publishes, so this table is shorter than the ones on our Finnish pages, and we have left the holes visible instead of filling them with something from across the border.

A town moving itself, three kilometres east

In 2004 it became clear to the municipality that the mine’s effect on the ground would reach further than anyone had planned for, and the answer was to move the town. Kiruna kommun’s own words are that mining is the base of the local economy and the municipality is therefore prepared to move parts of the town. Around 12,000 people are affected or have been affected, a figure that grew by 6,000 when LKAB widened its forecast in August 2025.

The new centre opened over three days, 1 to 3 September 2022, about three kilometres east of the old one. It was the first stage and not the finished article: the municipality says building continues and that Kiruna changes with every year that passes. Whole houses, parts of houses and individual details have been reused, moved and recreated in the new centre, the clock tower on Stadshustorget and Pekinghuset among them.

The moves come in waves. A 2019 decision covered 42 buildings, and the municipality lists the years they went: 2017, 2019, 2022, 2024 and 2025. More are now in scope under LKAB’s updated forecast. In February 2026 the municipality started work on a new development plan, and on 7 September 2026 it showed the first vision sketches for the stage after this one.

When does it end? Nobody in Kiruna kommun has said. Neither the transformation pages nor the town plan names a completion year, and the town plan calls the whole thing a large experiment meant to work for many decades ahead. You will read 2035 in a great many places. We could not find it on any municipal page we opened, so we are not printing it as a date.

The church is here, and nobody has said it is open

Kiruna church was moved whole on 19 and 20 August 2025, along a five-kilometre route built specially for the journey, to a new site between the cemetery and the town centre. The building weighs 672.4 tonnes and is 40 metres wide. Its bell tower followed on 26 August 2025, separately.

Then the sentence that should decide your plans. The municipality says the church is in place but that much work still remains, and it gives no reopening date and no visiting hours. We did not find a parish page saying otherwise. A visitor arriving this winter may well find it closed, and any page telling you to go and see inside the relocated church has invented an opening that nobody has announced.

Go and look at it from outside by all means, and understand what you are looking at. The photograph at the top of this page was taken in March 2011, at the old site, fourteen years before either building moved.

Down the mine, whatever the sky is doing

Two things here work whatever the sky is doing, the mine and the Icehotel below, which is the practical argument for Kiruna over a smaller base.

The mine tour goes underground to LKAB’s visitor centre at the 540 metre level. It takes three hours, leaves from the Kiruna Tourist Center at Malmvägen 9B, and includes the transfer, a guide and a coffee break. Prices on 19 September 2026: 590 SEK for an adult, 490 SEK for a student or a visitor of 65 and over, and 190 SEK for a child of 6 to 15. Children must be at least six years old and at least 110 cm tall, which rules out a fair number of family trips before anything else does.

The ice hotel in Sweden: Icehotel at Jukkasjärvi

The ice hotel in Sweden near Kiruna is the Icehotel, at Marknadsvägen 63 in the village of Jukkasjärvi, which the hotel places 200 km north of the Arctic Circle. It has been built there since 1989. It calls itself the world’s first and largest hotel built from snow and ice, and it is rebuilt each winter from ice cut out of the frozen Torne river, so every year it takes a new shape. In the ice rooms, the hotel says the temperature is around minus five degrees, and you sleep among reindeer skins in a sleeping bag.

Two different things share the name, and people book the wrong one. The ice rooms and art suites are seasonal, open December to April: between fifteen and twenty ice rooms and twelve art suites, handcrafted by artists. The Art Suite 365, the Deluxe Suites 365 and the Arctic Cabin are year-round, and there are warm rooms too. If sleeping on ice is the point of your trip, check which room type you are looking at before you pay, and come between December and April.

Neither the Icehotel’s own site nor ours gives you a rate. We opened its home page, its winter page, its accommodation list, its experience page and its contact page, and room types and seasons are all there while prices are not. So this page names no SEK figure for a night, and we cannot tell you how far Jukkasjärvi is from Kiruna either: the hotel’s own pages do not say, and we do not quote distances off aggregators.

What you can do there besides sleep: the Icebar, an art and design gallery, a sauna ritual and an ice sculpting class, all on the hotel’s own list of experiences, alongside the outdoor tours that need weather to cooperate. How the Icehotel compares with the ice and snow hotels on the Finnish side is on ice hotels in Lapland.

The dark, the cold, and the figure Sweden does not publish

We ran Kiruna through the same sunrise calculator our Finnish pages use, day by day. The sun last rises on 10 December 2026, for 34 minutes, and does not rise again until 2 January 2027, when it manages 38 minutes. That is twenty-two days of polar night. On 21 December the centre of the sun gets to within 1.29 degrees of the horizon at local noon and no closer.

Kiruna’s own tourist board says the polar night lasts about 28 days. We have not been able to reconcile the two, and the likeliest explanation is a different definition of sunrise, so both numbers are on this page and we are not quietly choosing between them. Whichever you take, it is not total darkness: the board describes a couple of hours of twilight through December, and a blue hour around two in the afternoon that it says lasts about fifteen minutes.

Now the temperatures, with a warning attached to the column heading.

Read that table against a Finnish one with care. SMHI publishes a monthly mean; the Finnish Meteorological Institute publishes a mean daily maximum and a mean daily minimum, and those are the figures on every Finnish destination page here. A January mean of -11.3 °C does not tell you how cold the nights get. Putting the two kinds of number in one column would be quietly dishonest, so we have not.

There is no snow-depth row at all, here or on any Swedish page we will write. Every Finnish destination page on this site carries a median snow depth on the fifteenth of the month, from FMI. SMHI’s normals for 1991 to 2020 cover temperature and precipitation and stop there. Borrowing a Finnish depth for a Swedish town would be the easiest lie on this page and one of the least detectable, so the row is missing and this paragraph is why.

For the aurora, the honest local link is a research institute. The Swedish Institute of Space Physics, a government body under the Ministry of Education, has its headquarters in Kiruna and images the aurora from there, including with an all-sky camera. No Swedish equivalent of the Finnish frequency figures exists that we could find, so this page carries no odds and no percentage. What decides your nights is the mechanism, and our Northern Lights guide sets that out.

No list of places to stay, and why

There is no Kiruna accommodation list on this site. We have not checked places here to a standard we could state out loud, and we do not publish a list we cannot explain the selection rule for. Our general where to stay in Lapland page compares the kinds of stay instead, and if you want a bed in Jukkasjärvi specifically, the section above says what the Icehotel does and does not publish.

Getting in: a plane from Stockholm, a train outside town

Kiruna Airport is about 9 km from the centre, on Swedavia’s own figure. Swedavia’s destination page names only Stockholm and no airline; Kiruna’s tourist board, which is a marketing body and not an airport operator, says the flight takes 90 minutes with SAS or Norwegian. Whether any direct UK route exists, we cannot say: the airport’s full destination list sits behind a button that would not open for us on three attempts.

Swedavia names four road services at the airport and prices none of them. There is the Falcks Omnibus airport coach into central Kiruna, Länstrafiken’s bus 91 between Kiruna and Riksgränsen, the Nikkaluokta Express, which does not run in winter, and a door-to-door shuttle serving hotels in Kiruna, Abisko and Björkliden. No fare and no journey time is published for any of the four, so budget for the transfer without a number from us.

The trains are the more interesting half. From December 2026 SJ runs the Stockholm to Narvik night train through Kiruna, under a Trafikverket contract that runs to December 2028, with sleeping and couchette cars through to the end and no change of train. Norrtåg serves Kiruna from the south with several departures from Sundsvall. Snälltåget is running a one-off night train from Malmö by way of Stockholm to Narvik on 23 November 2026, returning from Narvik on 27 November, calling at Abisko and Björkliden.

Remember where the station is. Six kilometres out of town on the E10, open 05.30 to 21.00. We could not establish why it sits out there, which is a gap worth closing before you plan to walk anywhere with luggage.

What we checked

This site’s authority is Finnish Lapland. Kiruna is Sweden, we had checked nothing here before this week, and the page is thinner than a Finnish one because the record is thinner, not because the town is.

What we read ourselves, on primary sources: Kiruna kommun’s own pages for the town move, the building list and the church, Swedavia for the airport and its buses, Trafikverket and SJ for the night train, SMHI’s own normals spreadsheets for the temperatures, and a day-by-day run of the sunrise calculator for the polar night.

What came from the tourist board or an operator, attributed where it appears: the 90-minute flight from Stockholm and the airlines flying it, the mine tour and its prices, the Icehotel’s room types and seasons, the station’s location and hours, and the 28-day polar night.

What we left out. SMHI does publish a precipitation normal for Kiruna, about 561 mm a year, but the measured series behind it ends in 1993 and most of the 1991 to 2020 window is filled in by SMHI’s own interpolation method, so we have not printed it as a fact about the place. There is no snow depth, no daily minimum, no aurora percentage, no visitor count and no completion date for the relocation. If you are weighing this against a Finnish base, Finnish or Swedish Lapland puts the two side by side.