Serra Pelada - A Lenda da Montanha de Ouro

Brazil, 1979. While swimming in the river near Serra Pelada, 430 km south of the mouth of the Amazon River, a child finds a small gold nugget. Word spread quickly, and within a week, several hundred miners flocked to the area, rising to ten thousand within a month and one hundred thousand in the following years. The mountain was thus transformed into an immense open-pit mine crowded with thousands of people climbing rickety ladders with heavy sacks of ore on their shoulders. An iconic site, already immortalized in a famous reportage by Sebastião Salgado, today it has become a small lake contaminated by prolonged use of mercury.