The Dendermonde gold hoard discovery began with what looked like a row of one-euro coins at the bottom of a freshly dug hole: construction workers breaking ground beneath an old brewery in Dendermonde, around 19 miles outside Brussels, have unearthed 40 gold bars and more than 4,000 gold sovereign coins estimated to be worth some $10 million at current market prices.
How the Dendermonde gold hoard discovery unfolded
Kobe Phillips, a student working part-time on the site, said he initially thought the objects appearing in the excavation were ordinary euro coins lined up in a row. He asked a colleague to help dig them out. It was only when they looked more carefully that the scale of what they had found became clear. ‘I thought they were one-euro coins, neatly lined up in a row. We dug them out, and then we saw a small bar of gold lying there, already attached to our digging hammer. There was actually a bit more than we’d thought,’ Phillips told Belgian broadcaster VTM, according to CNN.
A gold bar had lodged itself to the end of the jackhammer during the dig. Photographs from the scene show the bar in question in the top row of the recovered haul. Once the workers grasped the scope of what they were dealing with, they contacted the property owner, who then called the police.
The brewery where the hoard was buried dates to the 1890s, according to The New York Times. Most of the gold bars date to the 1960s, while the coins carry a range of dates and origins, suggesting the cache was assembled over time and concealed deliberately beneath the building’s foundations.
Legal process: who owns a buried fortune?
The East Flanders Public Prosecutor’s Office confirmed to CNN that authorities had recovered the gold and transferred it to a secure, undisclosed location while an investigation into provenance and ownership gets under way. Several people had already come forward with documentation claiming ownership of the hoard.
That investigation may take some time to resolve. Under Belgian law, finders must wait at least five years for potential owners to come forward and stake a claim to any treasure, according to The Guardian. That requirement applies even where, as here, several parties have already produced ownership paperwork. The legal framework reflects the practical reality that buried hoards often attract multiple claimants, and disentangling legitimate claims from opportunistic ones can be slow work.
For Phillips and his colleagues, the wait will be lengthy regardless of how the provenance question is eventually settled. Striking gold with a jackhammer is the easy part; establishing who it belongs to is considerably harder.
Gold prices and the value of recovered supply
The timing of the Dendermonde gold hoard discovery places it against an extraordinary stretch for gold prices. Over the past year, the metal’s value has nearly doubled since the summer of 2025. In January, gold reached an all-time high of $5,600 per troy ounce, before a sell-off pulled it back to $4,000. At the time of publication, Asian markets were trading the metal at around $4,460 per ounce.
Gold’s uses extend well beyond jewellery and personal wealth. The metal is a component in electronics, dentistry and aerospace applications. Scientific and industry estimates suggest a fair amount more than half of all gold present in the Earth’s surface has already been mined, which means that hoards like the one in Dendermonde, once returned to circulation, add to a supply that is not easily replenished.
The investigation by the East Flanders Public Prosecutor’s Office is ongoing, with the gold held securely while ownership claims are examined. Under the five-year rule, the Dendermonde gold hoard discovery will not be settled quickly, but for whoever eventually proves rightful ownership, the wait could be worth considerably more than $10 million, depending on where gold prices sit when the process concludes.
