By Jorge Silva
SERRA PELADA, Brazil (Reuters) -With a voice more youthful than his 72 years would suggest, Lucindo Lima sings about the untold riches he never made in Brazil's Serra Pelada mine, a site made famous by a 1980s gold rush immortalized by the late photographer Sebastiao Salgado.
"Under those mountains all our riches are hidden," Lima sings outside his decaying wooden house in Serra Pelada, a hilly district in the town of Curionopolis, in the Amazonian state of Para.
Set to host the COP30
United Nations climate talks in Belem, Para has seen a widening divide between mining by major firms such as Brazilian mining giant Vale and by artisanal miners, called "garimpeiros", hunting for gold, often illegally, in the Amazon rainforest.
Some garimpeiros are still hopeful of finding fortune in Serra Pelada, where a gold rush erupted in 1979, drawing thousands who dug by hand a cavernous open pit during the 1980s.
Striking black and white photographs taken at the time by Salgado, who passed away in May, captured men swarming around the pit like an open termite mound and jolted the world with what seemed like medieval scenes in the modern era.
As ore grades waned and the pit flooded, authorities shut operations in 1992, leaving a water-filled crater that became an emblem of excess in the frontier towns of the Brazilian Amazon.
Lima's song calls the mine "the queen of metals," but a two-hour drive from the flooded crater stands a new queen: Carajas, the world's largest open-pit iron-ore mine, run by Vale.
Vale's revenue from Carajas each year is roughly nine times all the wealth extracted from Serra Pelada, even adjusting the value of gold to current market prices near record highs.
The firm has deployed driverless trucks and artificial intelligence at Carajas, where it plans to invest 70 billion reais ($13 billion) between 2025 and 2030.
"Autonomous trucks can generate up to 15% more operational efficiency, that is, 15% more hours worked," said Gildiney Sales, the director of Vale's North corridor.
In Para, illegal gold mining has devastated rivers and tributaries, fueling deforestation and mercury poisoning. By contrast, Vale has vowed to preserve 800,000 hectares (3,100 square miles) of forest around Carajas - about five times the area of Brazil's most populous city, Sao Paulo.
Vale moves high-grade ore to port by rail, while garimpeiros travel via informal roads and river networks, often facing grave danger. At Serra Pelada, many still go underground to look for scraps of the precious metal.
"We are at a depth of approximately 25 or 26 meters," said miner Cicero Pereira Ribeiro, holding a pickaxe inside one of those dimly lit underground shafts that made fortunes in the 1980s rush.
Ribeiro and others are still holding out hope for Serra Pelada to yield more treasures, fulfilling the ambitions they have been nursing for decades.
"We haven't woken up from this dream yet," said Antonio Luis, a miner in Serra Pelada since 1981.
($1 = 5.40 reais)
(Reporting by Jorge Silva; Writing by Fabio Teixeira; Editing by Nia Williams)
