Construction Worker Discovers Gold Hoard After Literally Striking a Gold Bar with His Jackhammer

Police in Belgium recently made a most remarkable discovery while digging under the foundations of an old brewery.

While using a jackhammer on the property in the city of Dendermonde, about 19 miles outside of Brussels, construction workers noticed coins beginning to appear in the hole they were making.

Kobe Phillips, a student working a part-time, said that he thought at first they were 1 euro coins, and asked a colleague to help him dig them out. Then they saw that they weren’t—and that there was a gold bar stuck to the end of their jackhammer.

You can see the proof of it in the photo above on the bar third from left in the top row.

40 gold bars and over 4,000 gold sovereign coins were eventually recovered, estimated to be worth some $10 million at current market prices.

“I thought they were one-euro coins, neatly lined up in a row. We dug them out, and then we saw a small bar of gold lying there, already attached to our digging hammer. There was actually a bit more than we’d thought,” Phillips told Belgium broadcaster VTM, according to CNN.

After the scope of the discovery had been made clear, the workers called the property owner, who called the police.

The East Flanders Public Prosecutor’s Office told CNN authorities had recovered the gold and taken it to a secure and secret place where it would be held pending an investigation into provenance and ownership.

They also said that several people have already contacted them with proof of ownership documentation.

Most of the bars date to the 1960s, while the coins feature a variety of dates and bear a variety of origins.

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Gold has been much in the news over the last 12 months as its value has nearly doubled since summer of 2025. In January, the yellow metal reached an all-time-record high of $5,600 per troy ounce, before a sell off brought it down to $4,000.