À 2 kilometres de Rosia Montana, il existe une gigantesque carriere de cuivre a ciel ouvert, la Cariera Rosia Poieni. Dans les annees 1980, la construction d’un lac artificiel de decantation de ses effluents toxiques, a Geamana, situe a 7 kilometres a peine de Rosia Montana, a provoque, et provoque encore, un desastre ecologique majeur. Ce fut l’un des arguments mis en avant par les opposants au projet d’exploitation a grande echelle des filons auriferes de la commune. Le lac de Geamana a submerge un village de 400 familles. Seul le clocher de l’eglise emerge encore au milieu des boues toxiques qui contaminent nappes phreatiques et puits autrefois potables. La vie rurale survit aujourd’hui a grand-peine sur ses rives. The Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains are known for their rich underground resources. This is particularly true in the commune of Rosia Montana, nestled in the heart of the Apuseni Mountains. Exploited since antiquity by the Romans, its gold veins have never ceased to whet appetites. In 1997, Gabriel Resources (GR), a Canadian company, in joint venture with the Romanian state-owned company Minvest Deva, concluded a twenty-year concession contract with the government. The Canadians planned to extract some 300 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver, with an estimated value at the time of $16 billion. This would have made it the largest open-pit gold mine in the world. However, the project quickly ran into a powerful movement of popular opposition in Romania and worldwide. Indeed, GR planned to implement a polluting process, banned in Europe, using some 12,000 tons of cyanide. This involved the construction of a tailings dam that would have flooded the two villages of the commune and displaced their 974 families, divided between supporters and opponents of the project. Opponents highlighted the disappearance of the Daco-Roman site, of great historical and archaeological value, as