A team of builders struck gold -- $10 million worth of it -- during construction work at the site of an old Belgian brewery set to be used as a homeless shelter.
The team of eight workers in the city of Dendermonde found the hoard last week when a drill got stuck in a gold bar, local police said.
The gold was stashed in a bag under the stone cellar surface below the 1890s villa built for the brewery's onetime owner, Theophilus Van Assche, said local police officer Katrijn Braem.
The workers, who included an 18-year-old student working a summer job who first noticed the gold, dutifully contacted their employers and the police to report the find, which included Victorian-era golden coins and gold bars.
"Our teams collected and cataloged the gold, then promptly secured it in a high-security federal government vault," the local police said in a statement on their Facebook page.
Photos showed 49 gold bars laid out on a table at the construction site and hundreds of gold coins collected in the builders' bucket.
The site, which is currently almost completely demolished, is being renovated by social welfare group CAW Oost-Vlaanderen. The workers discovered the gold when they were in the process of laying sewage pipes for the new shelter homes set to be built there.
The fate of the gold is uncertain. There could be legal proceedings to decide whether the money goes to any descendants of the Van Assche family, the organization carrying out the work or the workers themselves.
The police in Dendermonde, a city of around 50,000 in the Flanders region, 18 miles northwest of Brussels, are warning potential scourers to stay away. They said that all the gold has been cleared and that the site contains several dangerous pits.
"It seems various would-be prospectors are keen to visit the site," the police statement said. "A piece of golden advice: It is truly pointless."
The find comes at a propitious time, with gold trading above $4,400 a troy ounce, having more than doubled in value in the past few years.
Piet Buyse, the former longtime mayor of Dendermonde, told Belgian media the gold most likely belonged to the Van Assche family, an old, wealthy Flemish family. The three children of Theophilus Van Assche never married, and it's possible no one knew the gold was stashed there, he said.
While the discovered gold doesn't yet have a new owner, it has already been put to use.
The Dendermonde police force is using as its Facebook icon a British golden sovereign with the image of a young Queen Victoria on one side.
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