In mid August 2026, workers from the Baasrode construction firm De Brand made a discovery almost nobody encounters in a working lifetime. During renovation work on a former brewer’s house on Van Langenhovestraat in Sint Gillis near Dendermonde, they came across a chest bricked into the cellar wall. Inside was gold, estimated at around 9 million euros. VRT NWS broke the story on 13 August 2026. So the news is not fresh, but the questions it raises still reach us regularly.
More than forty bars and some 4,000 coins
International media report more than forty numbered gold bars and roughly 4,000 gold coins, described in several accounts as sovereigns. No full inventory of hallmarks and dates has been published yet, so that count remains provisional.
The workers did not keep the find to themselves. They alerted their client, who called the police, and the gold was moved to a secure location. The East Flanders public prosecutor opened an investigation and is first examining whether there are criminal aspects. If there are none, the matter becomes a civil case. The building belongs to CAW Oost Vlaanderen, a social welfare organisation.
Probably a wealthy brewing family
Historian and former mayor Piet Buyse made the link to the Van Assche family in an interview with VRT NWS. Theofiel Van Assche bought land on Van Langenhovestraat in 1899 to build a brewery. The mansion the family had built there is the only building left from that estate. After the last family member died in 1982, the property passed to Dendermonde Abbey under the terms of the will.
Buyse points to the years after the 1929 crash. Many people no longer trusted the banks and converted their wealth into gold, which they then hid at home.
Since the discovery at least five people have come forward to the police as possible owners, ranging from a Latvian man whose grandfather is said to have worked at the brewery to someone claiming to have hidden the gold in a past life. Police chief Patrick Feys advised claimants to approach a lawyer or a notary rather than the police, because a civil court will ultimately decide.
What the law says about a hoard
The federal justice department set out the rules for VRT NWS. The finder must first try to trace the original owner. If that fails, the find is reported to the municipality within seven days. The original owner then has five years to claim the hoard. If that does not happen, the finder or the state becomes the new owner. When a hoard is found on someone else’s property, half goes to the finder and half to the owner of the property.
As of 1 October 2026 no public decision is known about who will receive the hoard. The investigation is ongoing.
What are 4,000 sovereigns worth? A rough sum
A sovereign contains 7.32 grams of pure gold. At a gold price of around 4,170 dollars per troy ounce, the level on 1 October 2026, that works out at roughly 870 euros of gold value per coin. Four thousand of them together are therefore worth broadly 3.5 million euros. A one kilo bar of pure gold is worth about 118,000 euros today, although the weight of the Dendermonde bars is not known.
This is explicitly a rough estimate. It calculates with pure gold at today’s price and leaves the collector value of rare dates out of account. How such a calculation works is explained on our page about the sovereign.
Many households own a small piece of this story
The Dendermonde hoard is exceptional in scale, not in kind. In many Flemish households there are still gold coins from grandparents, often bought in the same uncertain years and for the same reason. A handful of sovereigns or a small bar in an old cigar box is something we see regularly.
Two things help anyone who wants to sell such pieces. The first is knowing what you have: have coins identified before they go by weight, because a rare date does not deserve a melt price. How an authenticity check works is set out on our page about the gold check. The second is provenance. A registered buyer records your identity anyway, as we described in our article on the identity card requirement when selling gold. If you can also show that the gold comes from an inheritance, you avoid arguments later.
If you find something yourself during building work, touch it as little as possible and note where it was lying. The place of discovery partly determines who has a claim.
Dendermonde lies in East Flanders, right in the middle of our service area. That this hoard turned up there is coincidence. That more old gold is still sitting in cupboards across the region is not.