This town in Sweden has several interesting abandoned buildings and sites and is well known among Swedish urban explorers. The town is originally a mining town which began its history in the 16th century when iron-ore extraction began in the area. Today there is no mining activity here, it closed down in 1990. However there are plans to maybe start up again in a few years.
First we visited a quite strange area on a small hill called Öraberget. Among other apartment buildings with people living in them, we found 4 similar buildings that were clearly abandoned. They were quite vandalized and almost every window was smashed. No fences or attempts to keep people out made it easy to walk straight in. It’s weird to see newer buildings like this in such a state. The buildings were bought by an investor in 2003 that wanted to renovate them so Norwegians could rent the flats during holidays, but the plan didn’t work out and he went bankrupt.
The next place we visited was a street with yellow houses seen in pictures below. They were built around 1890 to house miners. This part of town is called Källfallet. Most of these houses are abandoned today but there are plans to reconvert them.
The last place visited was a building that was more of less a ruin. It was originally part of the old town and lies at the edge of a massive mining hole which is now filled with water. During 1900 the mining operations took place underground which made the foundation so unstable that the whole town center had to move in the 1970’s to where it is today. This is about the only building left from this era, but there are smaller foundations and traces of the old part everywhere. I felt a bit uneasy inside this building. Structurally the brick wall had fallen out several places and most of the building was tilted. But hey, had to go inside anyway. The building used to be an electrical power substation and according to another blog I found did the first commercial distribution of three phase alternating current in the world take place here in 1893.