Kiruna

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Kiruna is the northernmost town in Sweden, situated in the province of Lapland. It had 18,148 inhabitants in 2010 and is the seat of Kiruna Municipality in Norrbotten County.Esrange Space Center was established in Kiruna in the 1960s. Also in Kiruna are the Institute of Space Physics and the Department of Space Science belonging to Luleå University of Technology.HistoryOriginsArcheological findings have shown that the region around Kiruna has been inhabited for at least 6,000 years.Centuries before Kiruna was founded in 1900, the presence of iron ore at Kiirunavaara and Luossavaara had been known by the local Sami population. In 1696, Samuel Mört, a bookkeeper of the Kengis works, wrote on the presence of iron in the two hills. The Swedish senior enforcement officer and cartographer and mapper Anders Hackzell mapped the Kiruna area in 1736 and gave the mountains of the area their Swedish language names Fredriks berg (original Finnish name still in use as well: Kiirunavaara) and Berget Ulrika Eleonora (original Finnish name still in use as well: Luossavaara), after the King of Sweden Fredrik I and his wife Ulrika Eleonora.