Gold mining in the Philippines, explained.

People were working gold in the rivers around Paracale by at least the 12th century, long before Europeans arrived. They panned the streams and dug shallow pits into rich outcrops. When Spanish expeditions reached Camarines in the early 1570s, they recorded extensive placer gold mining here.

In the American period, dredges worked the rivers and companies went underground. In the 1930s, Paracale Nacional Gold Mining Company drove at least 2,200 metres of tunnels on the Manila and Vallejo veins, the same veins inside our Minahang Bayan today. Before the Second World War, government records list 13 active gold mines in the district.

The war stopped the mines, and only a few reopened. Over the following decades Philippine Iron Mines, the Bureau of Mines, Benguet Corporation and others explored the veins, but none went into large-scale production. The narrow veins suit careful, selective mining better than big open pits.

In all, the district is estimated to have produced about 150 tonnes of gold. Small-scale miners, including the Inocalla family, have kept mining here ever since. In 1991 the People’s Small-Scale Mining Act gave them a legal framework, which is how our Minahang Bayan came to be.

Minahang Bayan means “people’s mining area”. It is an area set aside by the government for small-scale mining under Republic Act No. 7076, the People’s Small-Scale Mining Act of 1991.

Only organised, registered small-scale miners can work in a Minahang Bayan, usually as a cooperative or an association such as ours. The area is declared through the Provincial Mining Regulatory Board, and mining is carried out under small-scale mining contracts and permits overseen by the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

The law aims to make small-scale mining legal, safe and fair: to create jobs, share mineral wealth more widely, and manage mining areas in an orderly and environmentally responsible way. It also requires gold from small-scale mining to be sold to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the central bank, or its accredited buyers.

Why it matters to an investor: mining here happens inside a legal framework, with a regulator, permits and environmental rules, rather than informally. Our association is a miners’ association, not a company; how outside investment can work alongside it is explained on the investor page.

In much of the world, small-scale miners mix mercury with crushed ore. The mercury binds to the gold, and is then burned off, releasing toxic vapour that harms miners, their families and the environment. Small-scale gold mining is the largest source of man-made mercury pollution worldwide, which is why the Minamata Convention on Mercury aims to reduce and eliminate it.

Our ore goes through a mercury-free process instead. A jaw crusher breaks it into small pieces, and a wet pan mill and a ball mill grind it into a fine slurry so the gold is released. The gold and silver are then dissolved out in leaching tanks and recovered as bullion.

Much of the gold in our veins is free-milling, meaning it is released by crushing and grinding alone, which suits this kind of process. Material left behind by older, less efficient methods, the tailings, can be reprocessed to recover gold that was missed.

We have worked with planetGOLD, the UN Environment Programme-led programme that helps small-scale miners stop using mercury. A mercury-free processing plant in Capacuan was built with its support.