LAGOS, Nigeria. (Voice Of Naija) An 18-year-old student working a summer construction job in Belgium has helped unearth one of the most extraordinary treasure finds in modern European history: 49 gold bars, approximately 4,000 gold coins and loose gold nuggets, all bricked inside the wall of a cellar beneath a 19th-century former brewery, with the hoard estimated to be worth approximately nine million euros, or more than $10 million.
The discovery was made on Tuesday, August 13, in the Flemish city of Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, about 65 kilometres from Brussels, when a team of eight construction workers were laying a new sewer line beneath the former Brouwershuis brewery, a historic building now owned by CAW Oost-Vlaanderen, a Belgian charitable social welfare organisation.
As the crew broke through part of the cellar’s foundation wall, they noticed something unusual glinting in the debris.
Kobe, the 18-year-old student worker who was among the first to spot the find, told Belgian public broadcaster VRT: “At first I thought they were €1 coins. But then we also saw a gold nugget lying there.
That’s when we realised it was something bigger.” Site manager Mario, who reached into the rubble to examine the objects more closely, confirmed the moment of recognition.
“I went to look and took the gold in my hands,” he recalled to VRT. “Our first reaction was actually disbelief. Of course, we hadn’t expected to find gold.”
According to the BBC, the crew reported the finding immediately to police. “We never really thought about keeping it to ourselves.” Kobe reportedly said.
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Police photographs released by the Dendermonde local police department showed the sheer scale of the find: 49 gold bars laid out side by side, a large bucket overflowing with hundreds of gold coins, and additional loose nuggets and gold items recovered from the cavity in the wall.
According to CBS News, the hoard had been carefully concealed inside a bricked-up section of the brewery’s cellar, suggesting it was hidden deliberately rather than lost accidentally.
The total estimated value of the discovery is approximately nine million euros — around $10 million, or roughly N16 billion at current exchange rates — making it one of the largest buried treasure finds in Belgian history, according to media reports cited by the Guardian and CNN.
That question is now at the centre of a formal legal investigation. Hanne Ollevier, prosecutor at the East Flanders Public Prosecutor’s Office, told De Standaard newspaper: “At this moment, it is not known where that gold comes from, nor to whom it legally belongs.”
She confirmed the prosecutor’s office had launched an investigation into the origins and legal ownership of the treasure.
Under Belgian law, objects found buried in the ground, particularly those of historical significance, are subject to complex rules governing treasure trove, cultural heritage and property rights.
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The outcome of the investigation will determine whether the gold belongs to the state, the property owner CAW Oost-Vlaanderen, the construction workers who found it, or some combination of the above.
Kobe, the teenage student worker who helped uncover the hoard, told VRT he was holding out hope. “Of course, we do hope we’ll get a finder’s fee. That would be nice,” he said.
Belgian police also issued a public warning urging treasure hunters to stay away from the construction site, noting that the area contains dangerous excavation pits and that all of the discovered gold had already been removed and secured by investigators.
The history of the Brouwershuis brewery and of the family that operated it before the property passed into charitable ownership is now at the centre of fevered speculation across Belgian media.
Who hid the gold? When was it hidden? And why? The gold bars and coins have been sent for forensic and historical analysis to help date the cache and potentially identify its origin.
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Ollevier confirmed the investigation was ongoing but declined to speculate on who might have concealed the treasure or when.
The discovery echoes other recent finds across Europe, where centuries of layered history regularly surface beneath construction projects.
In May 2026, workers building a highway in the Czech Republic uncovered a 2,200-year-old Celtic settlement filled with gold and silver treasures, the Eciks website reported.
In Belgium itself, medieval artefacts, wartime caches and family hoards have periodically been found during urban renovation, though rarely on the scale of the Dendermonde discovery.
In many Nigerian communities, the hiding of valuables within the fabric of a building is a practice with long cultural roots, from dowry gold embedded in walls to family savings sealed beneath floors during periods of war or insecurity.
The Dendermonde find is a reminder that the most ordinary of tasks laying a sewer pipe, breaking through a wall can suddenly connect the present to the past in ways no one anticipates.
For Kobe and his colleagues, a routine summer job became the discovery of a lifetime. The question of who ultimately benefits from that discovery will now be answered not by shovels, but by lawyers.
