Secret gold boom in Mainit, Nabunturan?
july 13
A new gold rush is now largely ongoing at a village named Pamintaran at the highland town of Maragusan, about two-hour ride up northeast of the capital town of Nabunturan in the Compostela Valley.
John Alfred Angcog, a gold prospector who has just come from Pamintaran gold rush area said in an interview Sunday in Nabunturan, that an estimated 20,000 miners are already exploring the area since it was opened again after exploring miners were temporarily barred by authorities to enter and explore in last February.
He said that the mining site has been opened again after the Maragusan municipal government has made a plan for the area.
“Pamintaran is about 4 kilometers from Maragusan poblacion and can easily be reached by single motorcycles unlike the other gold rush sites in Comval,” he said.
He said that about 300 small-scale tunnels are already operating and competing for rich gold veins in the area, adding that in fact some known mining-associated personalities who had hit it big in Diwalwal and even in as far as influential politicians and names from Agusan and Surigao areas have been heard to be also staking for a fortune in Pamintaran’s range of mountains, which reportedly consist of about 300 hectares.
He said that he and other members of his corpo (mining group) heard that early this year the area came to be known to have rich gold deposits when a group got a yield of about 6.6 kilos of gold after they had some 220 bags of ores excavated from one of Pamintaran mountains processed by the “planta” (carbon-in-pulp cyanidation plant).
Angcog also added that there are still few cynidation plants in the Maragusan and most of the ores from Pamintaran found their way to mineral processing zone downhill at Barangay Mainit in Nabunturan.
Mainit barangay captain Dominggo Malanog, in separate interview, said that in his barangay there are thirty (30) cyanidation plants mostly owned by outsiders of his village including foreigners like Korean nationals.
“They are the ones who are benefit from it, and not us,” he added.
The mountains and rivers of Barangay Mainit and the neighboring Barangay Bukal have long been known by exploring miners to have deposits of gold since the 70, although gold strikes and hits of small miners trigerring seasonal gold rushes have largely characterized the Mainit-Bukal mining area time and again in the past.
But since the firmer grounding and use of fabricated, small-scale carbon-in-pulp cyanidation plants as a technology and the continued high price of gold in the world market have changed the gold production parameters and in fact made more feasible the small scale mining.
Village chief Malanog bared that the Mainit-Bukal area has the mining sites in Payawan, Bugac, Pagtulian, Cabinuangan, and the older Saraban, Inupuan and Noknokan areas.
He said that guerilla-type of small scale mining activities even encroached into the Log Cabin area inside the 1,775-hectare Mainit Protected Landscape (formerly classified as Mainit National Park).
But with the lively operations of cynidation plants in Mainit mineral processing zone at present have fueled speculations that there is an ongoing secret gold rush and boom in Mainit-Bukal mining complex. (Cha Monforte/Rural Urban News)
Filed under: 23086172, Barangay Bukal Nabunturan, Barangay Mainit in Nabunturan, Mainit Protected Landscape, Pamintaran, maragusan, nabunturan , Barangay Bukal Nabunturan, Barangay Mainit in Nabunturan, Mainit Protected Landscape, maragusan, nabunturan, Pamintaran
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