Gold fever

The biggest goldmine in Europe happens to lie in northern Finland. It lies in the vicinity of Kittilä to be more specific, and this has caused gold fever.

The mine is in foreign ownership and this far has got more than 200 workers employed. The city council must of course be thrilled given this opportunity of new businesses establishing them in the area giving employment, not only at the mine but with all the other work opportunities coming with a bigger population needing services such as housing, schooling, shopping and medical care only to mention some, especially if the miners bring their families up there.

This goldmine is estimated to give 5000 kgs gold out of 1 million kgs rock and ground mined, and the mining was first begun as an open mine but now a 800 ms long tunnel has been made into the rock. Wonder how deep it will go in the end?

I have been in a couple of silver mines and they were deep ones. The one I had the opportunity to visit was driven into with huge dumpers, and they had kms and kms of road under the ground. And the place being so huge inside you never really realised you were under ground and did not get claustrophobic. Only thing was that it was pitch black and really cold even it being in during a heat wave.

Kittilä as it happens is one of the airports you to fly to from southern Finland when going skiing in Lapland. And if I recall it correctly it just was damaged in a fire last year and has recently been restored, so with the goldmine the traffic probably increases even more with all skiers in the winter, tourists, miners and wannabee gold diggers hoping to make their luck in the wilderness of Lapland.

As I already have my own pair of genuine Lapland gold nuggets as earrings, so I do not have to go gold-digging.