Internet Sparks Gold Rush – remote Brazilian town

A gold rush in a remote Brazilian town has been driven by the internet.

Up to 10,000 people have cut down huge trees, diverted streams and dug ever-deeper mines, in an area that only months ago was pristine rain forest.

They were drawn to the region by a local math teacher’s internet descriptions of miners scooping up thousands of dollars in gold in Eldorado do Juma, in the jungle state of Amazonas.

One of the prospectors, Antonio Carlos dos Santos said: “For me this is an open door after experiencing a big crisis due to a fall in the agriculture and fishery sector.”

He and hundreds of other mud-covered men with picks and shovels hack away daily at the earth, marking their tiny plots with tree branches and string.
Others feed dirt into wooden troughs, washing off lighter sediment.

What is left is jiggered in metal pans.

The lucky ones can sell their precious nuggets for about £9 a gram.

Not since the early 1980s, when tens of thousands of Brazilians transformed a mountain known as Serra Pelada into a gargantuan hole in the jungle floor, has the Amazon seen a gold rush of these proportions.