President Dan excludes mining at Rosia Montana using today's technology

On a tour at Rosia Montana on Monday, President Nicusor Dan said that, under the current technology, he excludes mining the local gold reserves in the Apuseni Mountains.

Asked by a journalist if he still sees Rosia Montana mining or more as a tourist destination, Dan replied that "without mining using today's technology."

"It is a matter of technology. If we are talking about gold and today's technology, mining is excluded, to be very clear. I mean, for the level of resources we have here and the technology we have today, you can only mine by destroying everything, and you can't do that. The identity potential, beyond the economic one, is much greater by keeping everything than by scraping everything," he said.

He added that "if in 50 years' time there is some adequate technology all the better."

The President was at Rosia Montana on Monday, accompanied by family, to visit the local Roman Galleries and meet volunteers of the "Adopt a House at Rosia Montana" campaign.

He added that last time he was there was when his daughter was three months old.

"I am glad that there are small restoration works, compared with what we have to do at the level of the locality. I can see that small accommodation and restaurant establishments have developed. Obviously, the place has a much higher potential than the current one and needs a strategy that comes, I think, from the national level," he said.

The Rosia Montana mining cultural landscape was inscribed on July 27, 2021 in the UNESCO World Heritage List, thus recognising its exceptional universal value, substantiated by four of the six cultural criteria established by the World Heritage Convention: the most important, extensive and technically diverse underground mining complex of Roman antiquity, together with ore exploitation areas, residential areas, sacred areas, necropolises.

In the underground of Rosia Montana there are over 150 kilometres of galleries, in the depths of the four mountain massifs. There, the largest gold mining system of the Roman era known so far was documented, and also an extensive mining system of the modern era (17th-18th centuries) using gunpowder and dynamite in the 19th -20th centuries.

Specialists claim that the Rosia Montana mines had been in use 150 years before the occupation of Dacia by the Romans.

Studies show that the proven reserves of the Rosia Montana deposit amount to 323 tonnes of gold and over 1,600 tonnes of silver.