IN a small village named Pamintaran at the highland town of Maragusan—a two-hour ride up northeast of the capital town of Nabunturan in  Compostela Valley—a new gold rush is astir.

John Alfred Angcog, a gold prospector who has just come from the gold-rush area, said in an interview on Sunday in Nabunturan  an estimated 20,000 miners are already exploring the area since it was opened again after exploring miners were temporarily barred by authorities from entering in February.

He said the mining site was reopened after the Maragusan municipal government made a plan for the area.

“Pamintaran is about 4 kilometers from Maragusan poblacion and can easily be reached by single motorcycles, unlike the other gold-rush sites in ComVal,” he said.

About 300 small-scale tunnels are already operating and competing for rich gold veins in the area, according to him. In fact, some known mining-associated personalities who had hit it big in Diwalwal, and even influential politicians and names from Agusan and Surigao areas, have been heard to be also staking for a fortune in Pamintaran’s range of mountains, which reportedly consists of about 300 hectares.

He said he and other members of his corpo (mining group) heard that early this year the area came to be known to have rich gold deposits when a group got a yield of about 6.6 kilos of gold after excavating from one of the Pamintaran mountains some 220 bags of ores, processed by the planta (carbon-in-pulp cyanidation plant).

Angcog said there are still a few cyanidation plants in the Maragusan area and most of the ores from Pamintaran found their way to mineral processing zones downhill at Barangay Mainit in Nabunturan.

Mainit barangay captain Dominggo Malanog, in a separate interview, said there are 30 cyanidation plants, mostly owned by outsiders, including Koreans, in his village.

“They are the ones who are benefiting from it, and not us,” he added.

The mountains and rivers of Barangay Mainit and the neighboring Barangay Bukal have long been known by exploring miners to have deposits of gold since the ’70s, although gold strikes and hits of small miners triggering seasonal gold rushes have largely characterized the Mainit-Bukal mining area time and again in the past.

But the firmer grounding and use of fabricated, small-scale carbon-in-pulp cyanidation plants as a technology and the continued high price of gold in the world market have changed the gold-production parameters, and in fact made more feasible small-scale mining.

Village chief Malanog bared that the Mainit-Bukal area has mining sites in Payawan, Bugac, Pagtulian, Cabinuangan, and the older Saraban, Inupuan and Noknokan areas.

Guerrilla-type, small-scale mining has even encroached into the Log Cabin area inside the 1,775-hectare Mainit Protected Landscape (formerly classified as Mainit National Park).