Welcome to the second miners estate of the tour called Övre Glamsarvet. The first estate was Puttbo which was transformed from a dairy farm and was the starting point for this tour. The house you are standing next to now was from the very beginning a miners estate. I will tell you a bit about the house you are standing next to now but first I would like to tell you about the history of minor estates.

The biggest challenges that the mine has dealt with throughout history has been collecting water and recruitment of manpower. A lot of work had to be done around the mine to make sure that the mining process could be completed. With this in mind King Magnus Eriksson wrote in the letters of privilege that every man working in or around the mine would be relieved from taxes and also be able to claim the land they were living on as their own estate. This is why many of the names for these houses end with -arvet – meaning the inheritance, or -täckt – meaning taken (forest) land. The families of the first estates became by time very rich thanks to these tax relieves.

Övre Glamsarvet has been home to a lot of leading persons in the Falun community during the 1700s and 1800s. However in 1906 the estate was sold to the mining and forestry company Stora Kopparbergs Bergslag AB. Nowadays the estate is again owned by a private family and a modern residence house has been added as well as an historic attic, or loft that was transported here from Falun.

The miner estates are spread out on the country working as farms for the miners but they are often closely linked to the mining production. This estate is located close to a furnace, which is where the miners smelted the rock to extract the desired metal, in this case the copper. We will now continue down to the site of the furnace which is located on the other side of the estate, next to a small stream.