In 1986, geologists found gold near the town of Kittila. The Geological Survey of Finland began exploration, discovering gold mineralization that diamond drilling confirmed over the next five years. When exploration paused in 1991, the deposit's potential was clear but uncommitted. The property changed hands in 1998, sold to Svenska Platina AB, a subsidiary of Sweden's Riddarhyttan Resources AB. Permitting began in 2002. By 2004, feasibility studies suggested reserves between two and 3.7 million ounces, and Canadian mining giant Agnico Eagle purchased a stake, acquiring the rest of the company the following year. Additional drilling in 2005 punched 460 holes across 136,000 meters of rock. By September 2008, the proven gold reserve stood at 5.7 million ounces across 18.2 million tonnes of ore grading 5.12 grams per tonne.

The ore body at Kittila, also known as the Suurikuusikko deposit, stretches approximately 4.5 kilometers long, 3.3 kilometers wide, and 1.1 kilometers deep. Mining began with two open pits, the Suuri and Roura, where Caterpillar 777 dump trucks haul ore loaded by hydraulic excavators. The open-pit operation funds a parallel underground mine accessed by a ramp from the surface, where miners use both longitudinal and transverse long-hole stoping methods depending on the width of the ore zones. Narrow sections, less than five meters wide, are mined along the strike; wider zones are cut perpendicular to the ore body. Underground levels are spaced 30 meters apart, floor to floor, with access tunnels eight meters wide to accommodate 60-tonne haul trucks.

Ore from both the pits and the underground operation feeds into an on-site mill that transforms raw rock into gold bars through a sequence of increasingly refined processes. A crusher and semi-autogenous grinding mill reduce the ore to particles 5.5 millimeters across. Flotation cells separate gold-bearing sulphide material from waste rock. The concentrate enters an autoclave heated to 190 degrees Celsius at 19 bar of pressure, where oxygen breaks the bond between gold and sulphide. Cyanide leaching extracts the freed gold, which is smelted into 800-ounce Dore bars for shipment to external refineries. The process recovers 92 percent of the gold in the ore, and at capacity the mill produces up to four bars per week.

Production at Kittila began in May 2008, with the Suuri pit starting at 2,500 tonnes per day. In 2009, the mine produced 150,000 ounces of gold. By 2020, output had reached record levels: 6,473 kilograms of gold from 1.84 million metric tonnes of ore. These numbers make Kittila not just Finland's premier gold operation but the largest in all of Europe. The mine operates year-round in a landscape where winter temperatures plunge far below freezing and darkness dominates for months. Owned and operated by Agnico Eagle Mines Limited, a Canadian company that recognized the deposit's potential two decades ago, Kittila demonstrates that even in the remote Arctic, gold deposits of sufficient quality and scale can justify the extraordinary logistics of extraction.