Walking through the dense forests at Iviken a damp autumn day reminds about pictures seen from the temples at Angkor Wat in Cambodia or some Inca temple in the jungles of South America. Anyone without knowledge of the history of these giant concrete ruins could easily take them for remains of an ancient civilization.

The field was opened in 1784, where a modern mine and concentration plant were built around 1910 and it surely seems like a very ambitious task by the standards of that time as concrete was somewhat new as construction material for large buildings back then. The oversized shapes give a hint that the knowledge about strength in reinforced concrete was in its very early days.

Despite the ambition, Iviken seems like an early fiasco as the operations ended already in 1918. When the mines in the Håksberg field were consolidated after WWII, the Iviken field was joined underground with the mines at Ickorrbotten, Håksberg and Källbotten, and it seems like the concentration plant and other installations were obsolete by then. The mining activities in the Håksberg field finally ended in 1979.
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