Serbia increasingly appears to have the potential to become a gold miner’s dream, as the government announced Tuesday, Jan. 24, that a gold deposit that may be one of the top 100 in the world in terms of size has been discovered.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic announced this at a press conference, according to ekapija.com, noting that the new, undisclosed site has better potential “than the one in Zagubica.”
Serbia has generated great interest in gold minding potential of late, with Terra Balkanika, a subsidiary of Terra Balcanica Resources, having recently received a gold-mining exploration license to take soil samples in Southern Serbia’s Raska mining district.
That license covers more than 80 square kilometers of “highly prospective” land in the Raska district, according to the site, and this increases the company’s exploration area to more than 130 square kilometers in the same district, which is near Raska, approximately 280 kilometers south of Belgrade.
Mining giant Rio Tinto has also in the past announced big plans for Serbia, although not without controversy. In 2022 the Serbian government stated it would withdraw exploration licenses for its lithium mining Jadar project, which has been backed by the US government and US-based Betchel. Yet local environmentalists, led by the Association of Environmental Organzations in Serbia, have since called foul, stating in August that in fact the project has been quietly moving forward, following a leaked email screenshot noting that partner Betchel was at the time searching for a waste water treatment unit.
In response, Rio Tinto stated at the time that it’s “activities are a continuation of previous commitments” and that “it needs to collect and assess “design data from relevant vendors to meet applicable technical, environmental and sustainability standards,” as cited by Balkangreenenergynews.com.
Photo of a massive Australian gold nugget by James St. John, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
