Mining Area of the Great Copper Mountain in Falun - UNESCO ...

Copper from Falun was exported all over the world and provided shining copper
roofs for palaces like Versailles in Paris and for churches and manor houses in
Sweden and Europe. Spain adopted a copper coinage standard and used coins struck
in Falun copper. In Sweden, mints were established at Säter in 1624 and at Avesta in
1644. The Swedish 10-daler piece, weighing about 20 kg, is probably the heaviest
coin in the world.
The Great Copper Mountain was organised as a corporative operation, with yeomen
miners (bergsmän) owning shares (known as fjärdeparter) proportional to their
holdings of copper furnaces or shares in the same. The 1347 charter dealt among
other things with ore extraction, settlement and trade within the region. The
organisation of the mine was an early precursor of the joint stock companies of later
ages, and it is often referred to as “the oldest company in the world”.
Round about the Great Copper Mountain there evolved a cultural region which was
quite unique in Sweden, known as Kopparbergslagen. Here in the 17th century was
created the town of Falun, which with its 6,000 inhabitants was the second largest
town in Sweden at that time. Falun retains its 1646 layout and antiquated wooden
settlement in the three districts of Gamla Herrgården, Östanfors and Elsborg. The
last of these, created in the mid-17th century, is dominated by the mine workers’
small cottages, placed end-on in relation to the street. Elsborg can be termed
Sweden’s first self-built development. The wooden town of Falun was one of
Sweden’s pilot projects during European Architectural Heritage Year in 1975.
In the remarkable cultural landscape surrounding the Great Copper Mountain, there
were in the 17th century about 140 copper furnaces. Remains of these are visable all
over the region. Close to these, many miner-yeomen had their estates and manor
houses. Many of those residences are still extant today and, with their remarkable
buildings, courtyard configurations, gardens and agrarian landscape, constitute a
distinctive cultural environment. The agrarian landscape was dominated by grazing
land: meadows, wooded pastures and lindor. A very early and unique system of crop
rotation was already developed here in the 17th and 18th centuries, based on a fiveyear
cycle of different crops. This technique is known as lindbruk or the Falun
method. Features of the man-made landscape include medieval barns and house
foundations, clearance cairns, stone-walled enclosures and other monuments.
The copper furnaces were water-powered from at least the 13th century onwards,
and the earliest water-powered hoisting gear in Sweden was constructed in 1555 in
Blankstöten (one of the open-cast mines). Ponds, canals and dikes were built to
convey water to furnaces and the mine. The oldest of these dates from the end of the
14th century and is still to be seen today. A special dam watchman was engaged at
the Great Copper Mountain in 1604 and living quarters built for him at Korsgården.
Special buildings were constructed above the dam gates, to protect the dams and to
gain better control of the water flow. These structures still survive on the hills round
about the Great Copper Mountain, most conspicuous among them being Nya
Krondiket, constructed in the 1740s and a gigantic enterprise for its time.
Numerous travellers, princes and ambassadors visited the Great Copper Mountain in
the 17th and 18th centuries. The Chinese Afock from Canton, visiting the mine in
1786, wrote his name in the visitors’ book together with a short narrative:
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