Original subtitles

Gold mining prodigy...

And that's $3,000,000 right there on the table.

Parker schnabel, is searching

for his next big score.

This is wild.

Yeah!

Deep in the jungles of Brazil.

There's a huge amount of conflict over mining.

The only way to understand

is to come here and see it.

That is pretty cool.

If-if there's a opportunity for us to invest,

then I wanna look at those opportunities.

Look, look. That's gold.

Look at these bad boys.

I did get fitted for a bulletproof vest, though.

That's a first.

So they have a bunch of nuggets in here from serra pelada, right?

Yeah. They have some of the biggest goat nuggets in the world.

Look at these doors.

Wow.

We cannot show the doors.

Wow! Look at all these.

Wow. Look at that one.

Where did this one come from?

This comes from serra pelada.

The place we are going next.

I don't really know anything about serra pelada.

All I know is that there was a huge gold rush there in the '80s.

And that billions of dollars worth of gold got found.

By hand.

Like, the people are alive still.

That's cool.

Here they have the biggest gold nugget

that was discovered in serra pelada in the '80s.

This is real.

- Can we film that? Okay. Great. - Yeah.

Wow. Okay.

It's around 60 kilos.

One thousand six hundred.

Try ounces.

Like 130 pounds, 135 pounds.

You would never melt that down.

A collector would probably pay

I don't know, $100,000,000?

What?

Like, at a... Like, at a big auction? Like, who knows?

My god.

Very strange looking.

This looks so dark.

Here. It's got a wire structure. See?

And it's, like, wired.

All stuck together.

Like, normally, gold nuggets are just

hunks of gold that are pretty boring.

But that one's very interesting.

- And this one? - I would like it.

I was not expecting to walk in a room

with the biggest golden nugget in it today.

- Yeah, right? - That's pretty cool.

That's really cool.

Looking at this stuff, it definitely seems

like we're on the right track.

And serra pelada seems like a good place to go.

And see if there's more left.

Diego. Stop.

What?

Stop driving like that.

I'm gonna puke all over you.

On a journey that started in pôrto velho,

Parker schnabel and his team head from the capital, Brasília,

to the state of pará

and the remote amazonian town, of serra pelada,

home to one of the biggest gold rushes in history.

Over $5 billion of gold in today's money

was found in just 13 years.

Nearly seven times more than the infamous

klondike gold rush.

So when did the majority of the gold

come out of the ground in serra pelada?

So, like, it was the beginning of the '80s,

- it's when it started. - Yeah.

Because people discovered the gold.

So after the first discovery,

like, the-the word spreaded

and, like, everybody came to serra pelada.

In 1979,

a cattle ranch owner struck ground so rich in gold,

that nuggets worth $100,000

could be extracted by hand.

Word spread, and within months,

thousands of hopeful miners from across South America

descended on serra pelada, to seek their fortune.

This is a pretty cool video I found on serra pelada.

It's wild.

On any one day, there's anything between 40

and 80,000 of these blokes,

all digging away feverishly

to make this hole in the ground wider and deeper.

What?

It's crazy, right?

And by 1984,

when an Australian film crew arrived to document the rush,

the pit was 600 feet deep and 1,300 feet wide.

Whatever they did before they came here,

these fortune seekers, or maybe they're just wishful thinkers,

are now prospectors. They all come here

for the dream of getting filthy rich overnight.

Unable to afford machinery

or to transport it to the middle of the jungle,

the miners dug the enormous pit entirely by hand.

At its height, over $2,000,000 worth of gold

was being pulled from the mine every day.

It's crazy that, like, that much happened in the 80s, and then...

Seems like almost nothing's happened since then.

Look at this. Gorgeous jungle out here.

Yeah. It's proper, isn't it?

Right in it.

So this is full-on Amazon rainforest, is it?

It is. It is.

I know it doesn't look like, but we are almost at the pit.

The serra pelada pit.

The hole? The big hole?

Yeah. We're almost there. Yeah.

Do you mind if you, like, go slowly

so we don't miss it?

- Yeah, it's here. - What?

- Where? - It's here.

- That was the pit? - That's the serra pelada pit. Yeah.

What, the lake is?

And there was a-a hole...

Just a hole for mining?

Yeah, it's like a huge hole.

Let's go.

Oof.

Looks a bit different to the video you showed us.

They found something like 2.6 million ounces.

In that hole.

Like, how much was there, though?

That question really bothers me.

It's what's left.

It seems kind of crazy to me

that it was that rich and then

I haven't really heard of it producing ever since then.

So what's happened then?

We'll probably be able to find out from someone firsthand.

That's why we need to talk with barbudo.

Because he was here during the 80s.

Cool. Let's go find him.

Next to the infamous pit

is the small gold rush town of serra pelada.

Driving through the jungle for hours on end.

And then suddenly,

there's a little town.

Strange, little town.

Really weird, innit?

We're gonna stick out so bad in this town.

Barbudo.

- Barbudo. - Yeah. We need to find barbudo because,

he's the one that will be able to tell us

where we can find the gold,

what is still going on in here, you know?

Or where we should go next.

- Here we are. - Here we are.

Let's go find barbudo then.

One thing this place is not short on...

Is character.

Have a look around you.

It doesn't feel like the richest of towns.

Ooh.

Barbudo is a bona fide old timer

who arrived in serra pelada in 1981,

at the height of the rush.

- Barbudo. - Barbudo.

This guy's amazing.

"Barbudo." how does that translate?

- "Big beard." - "Big beard?"

Was he a part of a good claim?

Working small 6x9 foot claims,

barbudo was one of the thousands of miners

fighting for their share of the billion dollar bounty.

One thing that helped not to be... to get so violent

was that they weren't allowed to-to carry any knives, any nothing.

Ten years later, the gold was still flowing,

but dangerous landslides claimed lives.

In 1992, the government shut the mine down,

forcing thousands out, including barbudo,

and leaving the pit to flood.

But to this day,

most serra pelada miners share one belief,

that much more gold remains in the ground.

He thinks that there's way more still there

- than what got mined out. - Way more. He's saying that

what's is still there, it's like an unmeasurable.

Why is it not being mined?

Longstanding legal battles around the pit

leave thousands of ex-miners in barbudo's position.

Waiting for permits

to allow them to mine the riches

of serra pelada once again.

He's waiting for a chance to mine again,

and when he's able to mine and find the gold,

and buy a new house,

that's the time when he will cut his hair

and beard, and make a new ID.

So he looks good on the picture.

And is there mining happening?

There is this one guy.

He has the permit.

Do you think they'd be cool with us going there?

He can take us there.

Yeah. Get in the middle.

Here we go.

Big beard and big hair, too, right?

It's just an absolutely fascinating story

and piece of ground.

You know, hopefully, there's still tons of gold to find here.

And so it would be cool to get actual hands on the ground

and see what's going on.

In the heart of the Amazon,

Parker and his team head towards the site

of Brazil's biggest the modern day gold rush,

the 1980s strike of serra pelada.

Whether or not there is a lot of gold left,

that still has an element of mystery attached to it.

Here it is.

Just 50 yards from the flooded pit

is the small mine of chico osorio,

veteran of the gold rush.

He is one of the only people who still has a permit.

Parker.

The king of gold.

Yeah, right.

He says he's the king of gold here, you're the king of gold there.

What happened?

Was a motorbike accident.

- When? - When?

Thirty days. Recent.

He was your age when he was working in the mine.

Found 1,000 kilos of gold in 15 days.

I don't think I've ever met anybody that's...

Found that much gold in that amount of time.

- I mean, for sure I haven't. - Because,

so it sounds like the vein of gold was just, was, like, super rich.

That's crazy.

Chico's one ton gold windfall,

equivalent to $32,000,000,

is legendary in serra pelada to this day.

And for a few years, chico lived the high life.

Owner of two private jets,

chico was a regular on the Rio de Janeiro party scene.

He was doing parties, like, in rio,

in other parts, like, in the beaches, everywhere.

Not here.

I love how normal it is for them.

Like, talking about what it was like in the '80s.

For them, it's just like, "yeah, it's not a big deal."

I think it was definitely a big deal.

So what happened to the-to the rest of the money?

And he say they spent

he spent all the money in the-in the cave,

in the-in the pit.

Because he was investing to find more gold.

Gotcha.

He's saying that, like, there are some areas

where there are really big, old nuggets still.

He wants to go with you and, like, to show you.

Sweet. That would be cool.

For the last 20 years,

chico spent all his money mining at the pit's edge,

trying to get back on the gold vein

that made him a millionaire in the 1980s.

Somebody hits the lottery and wants to spend

every last penny that they made on more lottery tickets, so be it.

But I'm boring.

I mean...

You look at me right now and you look at chico

when he was at my age.

Which one would you rather hang out with?

Chico was, like, chartering jets out of the jungle

to go stay in the fanciest hotel in rio

with rags for clothes.

Like, I'd much rather hang out with him than me.

I'm boring.

So he's telling me that...

It goes 17 meters down,

then there's a tunnel that goes this way

and then it goes down 24 meters more.

So in total, it's 41 meters.

And it's in solid rock?

- Yeah. - How do they get through the solid rock?

Yeah. Jackhammer.

- This is wild. - It is.

They are not working here

because they ran out of money.

So people that were working here just quit.

Have you ever seen anything like this?

No. Man, that's deep.

What happened?

- What happened? - I twisted my knee then.

You okay?

Dan, are you okay?

Yeah.

- Man. - Hell.

But after striking out,

chico can't afford to dig any deeper.

Now he's trying to find gold

in the Ridge alongside the pit.

Here they used excavator to dig this role

because they wanna reach the...

The red-the red rock over there

because that's where they think there's gold.

Millions of years ago, rivers of hot magma,

containing liquid gold and quartz

flowed under the landscape of serra pelada

as volcanic activity forced the magma upwards.

The unique geology of the area

meant soft rock was saturated,

creating quartz veins with up to 80% gold volume.

Tectonic movements then pushed the gold bands up to the surface,

creating what would become

one of the richest hills on earth.

Now chico is chasing iron-rich red rock,

known as bulls blood,

usually a strong sign that gold is nearby.

I'm curious about this whole thing.

Also, like

I'd love to help them out with the excavator if we can.

Like, if we paid for a couple days rent,

would that help them...

You know, find out more about what's going on?

He say it would be a big help

because if you bring an excavator here,

you could try to get that rock from there.

Yeah, when they got, like,

to break all the-the... The rocks there,

his time without money will pass and...

And you'll find a lot of gold there.

He'll be, like, with his plane again, and...

We'll do that as long as he promises

to go to the hospital and get his leg looked at.

He said that the only thing he wants is to-to heal...

- Okay. - And go to the hospital.

Okay. Well, we're gonna go find a place to, sleep...

- Yeah. - And,

we'll come back and help his guys out tomorrow.

Finally, we found a place where we could go and help

because the places we've been before,

it was a lot like tricky, sketchy,

like, illegal places, you know, like...

And this, for the first time during this trip,

we found a place where it's legal.

There is the mining right there, so it would be good

to check if there's... if there's still gold in here.

There's this rags to riches to rags story

of serra pelada, right?

And I think basically you had a town

hit a, $5 billion lottery, and...

All that money has been vacuumed out, right?

Like, it's all gone.

But they're saying, "there's gold still in the ground."

There's only one way to find out.

Diego.

What up, mate?

I've got a bit of an issue with my knee.

What happened?

Did you see how I twisted it on the mine yesterday?

It's swollen up a little bit.

And I can't straighten it.

- Pain? - Yeah.

- Now? - Little bit.

Turn around.

Upside down.

What happened? What did you do?

That was it.

You need to go to a hospital.

We don't have the resources here

to do an ultrasound or an X-ray.

Even worse with iso.

He will have to drive, like,

one and a half hours to two hours

to find a place where he can actually run the test

and get to the confirmatory diagnosis.

- High five, team. - Hi.

- See you soon. - You're and your bum joints?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

- See you. - Bye.

You can't just fix him?

Come on.

Dr. Diego, put some screws in there and bolt them together.

Do you think you'll be able to come back, like, soon?

Probably not today.

- I really don't know. - Yeah.

Well, I guess we'll go find an excavator without him?

- Yep. - Yeah.

At the edge of the legendary serra pelada pit,

Parker and crew have the chance to prospect for gold

on chico ozario's claim if they can find an excavator.

When you look at serra palada, I mean, you look at chico,

and he has to believe, as anybody would, that, like,

that's all still there.

And we just need to, you know, get our stuff together

and mine it.

Is the ground as good as they say it is?

I'd like to know the answer to that question.

All right.

See if we can find this excavator.

It's an interesting little shop.

Should he go in?

Yep.

Does he know where we might be able to find an excavator?

We need to take the right here.

These streets are too small.

Well, there's one.

A backhoe.

Not my preference.

- Backhoe? - It has a loader scooper on the front

and an excavator on the back.

I'm guessing it's probably the only one around.

Should we just start it up

and somebody will come running out?

Here's somebody coming.

Marcos.

He's the owner of the excavator.

He could run for us. It's available.

Can we go look at it?

Yeah.

Hey, we'll take it.

As long as he doesn't want too much money.

- 2,000 reals. - A day?

- It's like $400? - $400, yeah.

Yeah, that's fine with me.

I don't have that much cash on me.

Do we need to go get it now

or does he trust me to pay him afterwards?

Yeah, he trusts you.

- You can pay... - good.

The last thing I'm going to do

is not pay somebody around here.

The smallest excavators that we have are 50 tons.

That thing is probably eight?

And I don't know that a 50 ton excavator

would dig that rock.

So where I'm from, rock is rock.

And it doesn't dig.

But that sort of red bull's blood,

as they call it in Portuguese, it might be really soft.

I don't know.

It's all new to me.

All right.

A little funky on the old gear shifter.

Brakes aren't great.

Cool.

Parker's handshake deal gives the team

a day's prospecting on chico's mine

and a chance to see whether there's still gold to be found

at this 1980s hot spot.

Made it.

Hey, chico.

All right.

Let's see if we can dig a hole.

Eyes on the road.

Chico believes the iron rich red rock,

or bull's blood here,

is an indication they are on the gold.

Now it's up to Parker to see if he can break through to it

and test it.

I'm curious to see what comes out of this, right?

And I'm sure there's still a lot of gold

left in the ground.

But, who knows if it's right here in this little hole

in the ground we're digging.

But we're going to go find out.

Diego, do you think this could collapse?

Yes.

I look like I'm making Diego nervous.

Your left front is really close to the border.

That's the way I like it, Diego.

At chico ozario's mine,

on a Ridge next to the famous serra pelada pit,

Parker's prospecting to see if there's still gold in the ground,

40 years after the original rush.

It's just an absolutely fascinating piece of ground

and probably the last huge gold rush.

And it's hard to believe that they would have gotten it all.

I just want to see gold.

The rock is really soft, actually.

Unlike most hard rock, which has to be blasted,

here it's soft enough to dig with a backhoe.

I'm just worried that I'm going to shift

too far to my left.

When I put pressure on it,

that whole side's sinking right.

Yeah, it's sinking a little.

Just keep an eye on it.

We can see the red rocks there.

Parker, that's exactly what they want.

Perfect.

We can go down there and just walk down there

and fill some buckets if you're cool with that.

Yeah.

With chico's workers' help,

the team stockpile the iron-rich red rock

to be processed in the morning.

This is a happy lot, the kind of enchanted land,

maybe you don't want to leave.

Do they want me to stay here forever?

So we'll come back in the morning?

Since we got here, the feeling that I have

is people only talk about gold here, but I don't see it.

So tomorrow is going to be the day for us, like,

to discover if there is gold or not.

We will run the dirt tomorrow, right?

- We'll crush it. - We will run the dirt tomorrow.

Hey, guys.

- You're back. - Hey.

What are you doing here?

You all right?

- I am all right, are you? - We are. Are you?

I'm good.

I'm good. I've had a mad day.

- The doctor sent me to the mri place. - Yeah.

So I've stretched my medial ligament

and stretched my cruciate ligament.

So is it still hurting?

I haven't...

- You haven't moved? Okay, yeah. - No.

Don't do it.

If I straighten it, then it would hurt.

I am starving. I haven't eaten since breakfast.

- Go get a plate. - Yeah, I'm going to get one.

I'll get you a plate. Sit down.

- All right. Thanks. - Rest the knee.

- I'm gonna milk this one. - There's a plate here.

No, there's one plate here.

Look.

I'm going to get you to do everything for me.

She'll get you a plate.

Yeah.

And when I say everything, I mean everything.

Seriously.

Good to have you back, man.

Thanks.

- Me too. - Thanks for having me back.

So not to be a kind of downer on everything.

I can't walk.

And Diego's now sorted me out with this.

Which stops me bending my knee.

It's got metal inside of it, but it's manageable.

So just got to get through another month.

How much of this ground did you manage to move yesterday, then?

You remember when we were there,

- they show us like a red rock? - Yeah.

That's the bull's blood.

So we took some of the material there.

Eager to find out if there's any gold left

in serra pelada,

Parker and the crew head back to chico's for the results

of yesterday's prospect.

Hey, chico.

Is this only from what you guys collected yesterday?

Yes.

That's from what we got from yesterday.

They process a bit.

So now we're going to see the result of it.

How does this plate thing work, Parker?

If you take a copper plate and clean it

with a bunch of battery acid, Mercury will stick to it.

So this is a sheet of Mercury attached to copper.

Wow.

But it's like liquid Mercury, right?

You can scrape it off.

The red rock containing the gold

is first crushed into a powder

and washed over a Mercury coated copper plate.

The fine gold particles stick to the Mercury,

forming an amalgam.

The mixture is then scraped off the plate

before it's put in a cloth and squeezed

to make it into a solid ball.

It's like velcro.

- Yeah. - I see.

- Chemical velcro. - Gotcha.

That's extremely toxic.

Is this the same process they used in the '80s?

At the beginning, they didn't use Mercury,

like at the very beginning,

because the nuggets were bigger,

I guess, probably.

That squeezing takes out only the water

or the Mercury that is not bind to the gold.

That's right. Just like squeeze it down into a little ball.

It has just gold and Mercury stuck together.

There it is.

Well, how much does he think that is?

Half a gram.

Okay.

That's not a lot of gold.

Worth just $32,

the results indicate they are not on the gold.

He's saying, I still don't have the gold,

but just because I still haven't reached

the right deep to get the real gold that is underground.

I see.

So he's hopeful.

There's no such thing as a broke gold miner.

They're just temporarily off the pay street.

I mean, it's funny, and it's also like super sad.

Chico had to have been one of the most

successful miners here

during the big gold rush in the '80s.

And he's still like chasing that high, basically.

There's really not much difference

between a prospector who's hit it big

and is trying to do it again and like a drug addict.

Every question we ask him, the answer is always,

"we just need to get deeper,

and there'll be more gold

"than was in the hole from the '80s," right?

I mean, maybe he's right,

but it doesn't look like he was right today.

Despite another disappointing gold recovery,

chico refuses to give up the hunt.

Where?

The colossus?

He's saying that the company colosso, they were here,

and they perceive these companies

as stealing the gold from them.

Colossus, a Canadian company,

had the rights to mine a 2,000-acre claim

around the serra pelada pit.

Under their deal, the local mining cooperative

would take a cut of any gold found.

He's telling us that they would put gold inside ambulances,

and they would like...

They would pretend the ambulance had someone

injured in there.

He believes they were stealing it.

Yeah, I mean, colossus,

it really doesn't make sense to me.

I need to find out more about what's going on.

- That's him? - Yeah.

Big mustache.

Parker and crew visit another local gold miner,

Geraldo Capoeira,

who also made it big in the serra pelada gold rush.

The biggest audience in a movie theater in the world

ever registered was in serra pelada.

Wow.

They had like a big screen set in an airplane strip.

- So all the miners came. - 60,000 people.

- No. - Yeah, 60,000 people went

what did they watch?

Was porn.

That's crazy.

- Sleep well? - Yeah.

Who heard the whining dog?

The whining dog, yeah.

I heard the whining dog.

I was going to let him in, but I didn't.

Nobody did.

I thought about being nice, and then I wasn't.

So what's this article you sent us last night then?

What's that about?

Did you read it?

Yeah, I read it, yeah.

Really interesting.

Overnight, Parker's researched the story

of the mysterious colossus mine

that chico claimed stole serra pelada gold.

So basically, the way it went from...

And correct me if I'm wrong here,

but my understanding from what I read last night,

it sounds like there's a whole pile of scandal and corruption

with how they got in there

and all this crazy right?

Yeah.

And there are reports from the public prosecutor's office

here in Brazil saying that the agreement that they made

was not really benefiting the miners,

so that's why the miners don't like them here.

Colossus acquired the mining rights

to serra pelada in 2007.

Under their deal, the local mining cooperative

would take a cut of any gold they found.

But after seven years, colossus pulled out,

claiming not to have recovered a single ounce of gold.

But my understanding from what I read last night

was that colossus spent around $300 million

developing that mine site and then went bankrupt.

And the deal that colossus made,

like they agreed to pay $150,000 a month

just right out the door as well.

It'd be nice if we could find someone

- at colossus to talk to. - Really good.

- Like... - Really good.

Yeah.

I would be curious to see their take on all of it.

Yeah.

You have this local politics, and you have this

other dynamics that we don't really know, right?

I'm so curious.

You can just go there and ask.

Yeah, we can probably just go there.

Yeah? Right.

- Let's go. - Let's go then.

There's big beard.

He might know something about colossus.

Let's go and ask him.

And the company was operating like in a partnership

with the miners,

but it didn't went bright because the company made...

He calls it baboseira.

It's like a mess, made a mess here.

Right. Did they take the money and run,

or did they never make any money?

He doesn't know if the company...

He says there's a bunch of tunnels,

but he doesn't really know

if there is a lot of gold or not.

It's a little bit tricky to sort of

get to the real root of what's going on here.

So it's definitely worth doing a bit more investigation.

The team head to the site of the colossus headquarters,

located just half a mile northwest of the serra pelada pit,

to look for evidence of the mile-long tunnel.

I'm really excited.

Yeah, I am too.

I mean, abandoned mine. Yeah.

I want to see what's in there.

You excited, Parker?

I'm just curious how intact everything is.

I would assume that it's been scavenged.

We should make a turn to the right.

The next one?

- The next one, yeah. - Okay.

Probably it's here.

Holy that's the entrance.

Well.

Wow, that's barricaded.

Yeah.

What's going on?

That's quite sketchy.

Doesn't look very welcoming, I've got to say.

There is a guy over there.

It's like saying, "nobody's allowed in here."

He's a local miner.

- It's the... Isn't it? - Yeah.

Are they actually not going to let us in?

What the is going on around this place?

Next time on Parker's trail...

Two or three million ounces

came out of this hole in the '80s.

What is that?

Maybe these guys were like

look, look.

This is a very real opportunity.