Found a gold nugget as the gold rush began
July 3, 1979 Brazil gold rush
In 1979, Brazilian farmer Genesio Ferreira da Silva found a gold nugget on his property and hired a geologist to determine whether to start looking further. In a few days, this news spread throughout Brazil, and a real gold rush began. Within 5 weeks, 10,000 gold miners dug the ground and found nuggets weighing 6 kilograms!
By May 1980, already 4,000 miners had bought 2-3 meter plots of land and continued to dig deeper and deeper. Workers descended to the bottom of the quarry, filled the bags with soil and lifted them to a height of several hundred meters along wooden ladders. Each bag weighed about 20 kilograms, its contents were already sifted at the top in the hope of finding gold.
At the peak of the gold rush, the mine employed approximately 100,000 workers. Slums quickly appeared around the foundation pit, in which 60-80 murders took place every month.
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