The largest hand-dug gold mine the world has seen, and it started with a cowboy finding colour in a stream in December 1979. In January 1980 a child picked up a six-gram nugget and within a week thousands of people were on the farm; within five weeks there were 22,000 prospectors, and by 1984 around 80,000 men were working one pit with picks, buckets and ladders. Officially 44.5 tonnes of gold came out. Counting what went out the back door, the estimate is nearer 360. Sebastião Salgado spent four weeks here in 1986 and the photographs he made, men swarming a terraced pit on wooden ladders with sacks on their backs, are the reason most people outside Brazil have any picture at all of hand mining at that scale. The pit is abandoned now and full of polluted water; Vale mines hematite nearby. Pará, about 430 km south of the mouth of the Amazon.
Pará, Brazil
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