A construction crew in Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde tore into a cellar wall on Tuesday and found gold coins and ingots hidden inside. The haul, uncovered by 18-year-old Kobe while workers were demolishing a building on Van Langenhovestraat, is thought to be worth about €9 million.
Kobe said he first thought the objects were €1 coins. Only after the workers pulled out more pieces did it become clear they had run into something far larger. “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,” he said. The discovery happened while the team was carrying out groundworks to lay a pipe for the sewerage system, not during any formal search.
The sight stopped the job in its tracks. The workers had been removing a section of the foundations when more coins and bars came up, and site manager Mario said he shouted that they had found gold before picking it up himself. He rang his manager, who told him to notify the building owner and the police. “We kept digging up more coins and bars. Only then did it really sink in what we’d found. It was a strange feeling,” Mario said.
The find is now with the police at a secure location, and the East Flanders public prosecutor is investigating how it ended up there. That question matters because the gold was bricked into a cellar wall, which means someone placed it there deliberately, even if no one yet knows when or why. A spokesperson for the building owner said the discovery could be the result of fraudulent activity and that the gold may have been hidden there.
What the workers did next became the sharpest part of the story. They briefly considered keeping the gold, but Mario drew a line through that idea. “Besides, that would be theft,” he said. Kobe agreed, adding that the amount made any private claim impossible to imagine. “Of course, we did briefly consider keeping it. But it’s simply too much money. If it were a few thousand euros, it might be feasible. But €9 million — you simply can’t keep that hidden,” he said.
Ownership is still unresolved, and that is the part now under legal scrutiny. Mario said that after 33 years in the construction industry, it was the first time he had seen anything like it, and he does not expect another day like Tuesday. For Kobe, the memory is simpler: a wall broke open, a handful of what looked like coins appeared, and a routine job on a street in Dendermonde turned into the discovery of a gold hoard few people will ever see.
