Sweden is a beautiful and wonderfully mysterious place – and it’s a destination few divers consider when planning dive holidays. If you’re at all interested in cave diving, consider making a trip to Sweden, where historic mines, some hundreds of years old, hide secrets only cave divers are privy to today. If dark and deep dives are your favorites, you’re going to love what Sweden’s flooded mines have in store for you.
Artifacts Galore: The Mines of Tuna Hastberg
While Sweden’s landscape is dotted with abandoned mines that flooded long ago, the mines of Tuna Hastberg are ideal for diving not only because special equipment has been installed to carry heavy tanks and other equipment down to the entry point 250 feet below ground, but because ancient artifacts and other features make it a dive that stands out from many other cave explorations you might have conducted in the past.
Before your dive, you’ll be invited to take a tour of some dry passages; in summer, cascading waterfalls sparkle in the light cast from your headlamps, and in winter, those waterfalls are transformed into spectacular sheets of ice. Once your tour of the mine’s dry passageways comes to a close, you’ll make your way to a floating dock.
One in the icy water, you’ll follow a dark man-made passageway for about 10 minutes, after which you’ll reach a set of railroad tracks and a little wooden ore cart. A short distance from that lies a wooden hut where miners used to take shelter during dynamite blasts; though completely submerged and located a little over 300 feet below ground, these structures are completely intact.
Heaps of workmen’s gloves, a power room with dials and switches along the wall, and abandoned tools of all kinds can be found in another section of the cave; it’s as if the workers simply left after their shift, thinking they’d return again the following day – and that is what happened, as the mine flooded while it was unoccupied. The cost of pumping it out and rewiring it was simply too great, so after hundreds of years of production, it was abandoned.
Tuna Hastberg mine is definitely a top pick for cave diving in Sweden; with a subterranean warming room, a comfortable decompression habitat furnished with a pine bench, and other amenities, it is an outstanding site. The mines are well-mapped, the guides are top-notch, and best of all, there are miles of tunnels to explore. If you decide you want to conduct multiple dives here, you’ll find comfortable accommodations nearby – and you’ll have no difficulty obtaining air, since Tuna Hastberg has its own subterranean blending station, which is one feature not many cave diving locations boast.
The Tuna Hastberg Iron Mines have been abandoned since the 1940s, but thanks to very little sediment and cold, crystal clear spring water, the artifacts the miners left behind have been frozen in time. You’ll feel as though you are flying through space as you make your way through the tunnels, and once you make your way back to the surface, don’t be surprised if you find yourself craving another trip deep into the mines.