Gold under the Red Mountain

Utrecht and Sofia-based photographer Vesselina Nikolaeva has spent much of the last 10 years travelling to and from the small mountain village of Rosia Montana in western Romania, documenting the lives of mining families refusing to leave their homes in a valley under threat of clearance to build a chemical filtering station.

The area is believed to be the largest European site of gold deposits and has been mined for over 2,000 years - from the time of Caesar to the present day. It owes its name 'Red Mountain' to the streams of water which have turned red from toxic run off produced by years of undercontrolled gold mining.

"The hills, valleys and rivers of Rosia Montana were in deplorable and dangerous condition," Nikolaeva tells Phaidon, "ridden with arsenic, zinc and iron well above the legal limits."

News of a happy outcome for residents with private equity pumped into the region to aid safer mining has prompted Nikolaeva to publish her photographs in the gallery above. "It's uncertain future had kept me from initiating a photography project until now," the photographer says. 

"Over the years I followed the developments around Rosia Montana. I travelled to this little area in Transylvania and took my first photographs during the beginning of its metamorphosis from a region characterised by economic decline, environmental degradation and community anxiety and now into the gold mining standard for developments in Europe and across the world." Take a look through her photographs in the gallery above.