A construction crew was demolishing a house – and uncovered a $10 million gold hoard
Forty gold bars and 4,000 coins turned up mid-renovation—and the mystery only deepens from there.
The last thing construction workers expected to find while they were renovating a building in Belgium was a stash of gold hidden within its walls.
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The team discovered a chest that had been built into the cellar wall, filled with over 40 gold bars and 4,000 gold coins with no obvious origin or age. What little is known about the property hardly gives away any historical information. Once a brewer’s home around the turn of the 20th century, the structure now houses social welfare organization CAW Oost-Vlaanderen—but so far, nothing about the building or the gold itself explains who hid it, or whether the former owner even knew it was there.
“We stumbled across it while carrying out groundwork to lay a pipe for the sewerage system,” one worker from the construction crew, identified only as Kobe, told Belgian news outlet VRT. “We certainly hadn’t expected to find gold.”
After they spotted a gold nugget, the workers realized they couldn’t keep the discovery to themselves. So, they contacted local police, who said in a recent Facebook post that the gold was “inventoried and secured as quickly as possible in a high-security vault belonging to the federal government services.”
What the workers initially thought were €1 coins sitting alongside stacks of gold ingots turned out to be worth an estimated €9 million (almost $10.5 million USD). Police are now asking the public to keep away from the active construction site, which has been fenced off, though some attempts to break in have already been made. No further riches have been found during the ongoing renovation and demolition work.
The coins are still being studied to determine what their markings and other details could mean about their historical context, and in the meantime, the hoard’s historical and archaeological significance remains unknown. But chances are, the coins and gold bars were hidden for an interesting reason. Historically, hoards have been concealed for almost as many motives as there are coins. For example, wars, economic crises, and political upheavals often force people to stash their valuables where they can’t be stolen or confiscated by authorities working for corrupt leaders.
Further investigation will hopefully determine the age of the coins and where they were minted, but if the coins turn out to be modern, it’s possible that illegal activity was involved in the stashing of such a massive hoard. Someone might have thought an old house where a charity operates would be a hiding place no one would expect.
If the coins are from further back in time, though, the most recent ones could help determine when the hoard was accumulated. If the hoard’s rightful owners are out there somewhere, Belgian law gives them five years to claim their possessions, so long as there was no associated criminal activity. An investigation has already been launched by the prosecutor; no evidence of anything illegal has been found.
If no one comes forward and it’s confirmed that there’s no evidence of criminal activity, half of the treasure is supposed to be handed over to the owner of the property (CAW Oost-Vlaanderen), and the other half will go to the builders who found it. The CAW Oost-Vlaanderen charity helps about 45,000 people in the region, and while the organization is hoping that they’ll be able to use the money for those in need, there are still 1,823 days to go before they find out.
