Construction workers renovating a property in Dendermonde, a town of roughly 47,000 people in Belgium's East Flanders province, uncovered a small fortune this week when they drilled into a cellar wall and found roughly 50 gold bars and piles of gold coins sealed inside — a hoard now estimated to be worth about €9 million, or roughly $10.4 million.
The crew was installing new sewage pipes beneath the building's foundations when they broke through the wall and found the gold packed into a hidden chest bricked into the cellar. Among those on site was Kobe, an 18-year-old working a summer job on the crew. "Our first reaction was actually disbelief, amazement," he said of the discovery, according to local accounts of the find.
Who gets to keep it is now a legal question
The property belongs to CAW Oost-Vlaanderen, a Flemish welfare charity that provides social support services in the Dendermonde area. That ownership detail is now central to the story's second act: under Belgian law governing hidden treasure, both the construction crew that physically found the gold and the charity that owns the building where it was concealed may have a legitimate claim, and it will likely fall to prosecutors — and potentially a court — to decide who is entitled to what.
The East Flanders prosecutor's office has opened an investigation into where the gold came from and who originally owned it. Belgian law gives a rightful owner up to five years to come forward and claim hidden property once it surfaces; if no one does, dividing the find between the finders and the property owner would typically be settled under the country's civil code provisions on discovered treasure. Investigators have not said how old the coins are or offered a theory of who hid the cache, though gold sealed into walls or floors occasionally surfaces across Europe, often traced to wartime hoarding or fortunes concealed decades ago from tax authorities or creditors.
For now, the gold — inventoried bar by bar and coin by coin — has been moved out of the cellar and secured in a high-security vault run by Belgium's federal government while the investigation proceeds. CAW Oost-Vlaanderen has not said what it would do with any share of the proceeds if it is eventually awarded a portion of the gold's value. Belgian media said the discovery drew a burst of attention to the modest property, with neighbors describing it as the kind of find most people only encounter in stories about buried treasure — leaving the crew's brush with sudden wealth folded, for now, into the mundane task of finishing the sewage line they were hired to install.
