Eastern Serbia’s strongest spring sits directly downstream of a proposed open pit gold mine. In limestone country, that is not a manageable risk. It is a one way door to disaster.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A kilometre from the centre of \u017dagubica, the Mlava rises out of a limestone funnel in a natural amphitheatre about twenty five metres across. The water is between 8 and 11 degrees year round. Divers reached 72 metres in 2008 and turned back not because they hit the bottom, but because the upward pressure from the siphon channels was too strong to work in safely. The true depth is still unknown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vrelo Mlave has been under state protection since 1979 as a hydrological natural monument of the first category, and was confirmed as a Monument of Nature by government decree in 1995. Hydrogeologists classify it as the strongest karst spring in the Carpatho-Balkanide belt. Its recorded discharge ranges from 0.25 to 14.8 cubic metres per second, with a long term average around one to two. Its outflow curves away from the basin and joins the Tisnica.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two and a half kilometres west, the Belosavac spring is captured and piped: it supplies drinking water to \u017dagubica and Suvi Do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These are not scenic features. They are the water supply of a region, and they are the reason honey, medicinal herbs, trout and pasture raised livestock from Homolje command the prices they do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most arguments about mining and water assume a normal aquifer: contamination seeps into porous ground, moves slowly, disperses, gets diluted, gets partly filtered by the sediment it passes through. Monitoring wells have time to catch it. Remediation is at least conceivable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Karst does not work that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vrelo Mlave is an ascending spring emerging at the contact between Urgonian limestone and the base of the Tertiary series of the \u017dagubica basin. Its recharge comes mainly off the slopes of Beljanica. Between the rain falling on those slopes and the water surfacing in \u017dagubica lies a network of dissolution channels, caverns and fractures the “privileged pathways” of karst hydrology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that system:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The discharge range itself is the proof. A spring that can swing by a factor of sixty between drought and flood is not fed by slow seepage. It is fed by open pipes. The same pipes that deliver rainwater in a day will deliver anything else in a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The spring has also run completely dry at least four recorded times 1893, 1957, 1971 and 2002 in each case accompanied by local ground tremors. A system that responsive to shifts underground is not a system to drill through casually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The public debate has fixed on cyanide. That is understandable heap leaching with sodium cyanide is what was proposed for the low grade oxide ore here, and Baia Mare in Romania in 2000, where 3.5 million cubic metres of cyanide contaminated tailings destroyed 400 kilometres of the Tisa river system, is the reason people know the word.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But focusing only on cyanide concedes the more immediate point. Exploration drilling happening now, permitted separately, requiring no mining licence carries its own hydrological risks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Drilling fluids.<\/strong> Bentonite muds and polymer additives are pumped down the hole to lift cuttings and stabilise the borehole. In fractured limestone, circulation is routinely lost the fluid disappears into the rock rather than returning to surface. Where it goes after that, nobody tracks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turbidity and fines.<\/strong> Rock flour from drilling and trenching enters surface watercourses and sinkholes. In a conduit system it does not settle out; it arrives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sulphide oxidation.<\/strong> The Timok metallogenic zone, which this ore body sits on the western edge of, is known for unusually high arsenic content arsenopyrite occurs as an accompanying mineral throughout. Cores, cuttings and trench walls expose sulphides to air and water for the first time in geological history. Pyrite plus oxygen plus water produces sulphuric acid; acid mobilises arsenic, copper, cadmium and lead out of rock that was previously inert. This is acid rock drainage, and it starts small, starts early, and does not stop when the drill rig leaves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Boreholes as conduits.<\/strong> Every hole is a vertical connection between rock units that were previously separated. A poorly sealed hole through a mineralised zone into a karst aquifer is a permanent injection route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is also a straightforward quantity problem alongside the quality one. Local activists have reported that drinking water resources were drawn on for exploration drilling at \u010coka Rakita during the same dry summer months when \u017dagubica was under water restrictions. Whatever the eventual disposition of that claim, it is the kind of question a community is entitled to have answered on the record, with meters and figures, before the drilling expands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Precision matters, because vagueness is the easiest thing for a company to correct in public and use to discredit everything else you said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dundee Precious Metals (Toronto)<\/strong> is the operator in Homolje. It has worked in Serbia since 2004, and has explored the Homolje hills since 2006 through Avala Resources<\/strong> acquired outright in 2016 and more recently through Crni Vrh Resources<\/strong>. Two projects sit on \u017dagubica territory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rio Tinto is not the operator in Homolje.<\/strong> The association exists because Avala Resources held a joint development agreement with Rio Tinto before the Dundee acquisition, and because Jadar taught Serbia what a foreign mining project looks like from the inside. Both are worth knowing. Neither makes Rio Tinto a party here, and claiming otherwise hands your opponent a free win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zijin Mining (China)<\/strong>, through Serbia Zijin Copper 63% Zijin, 37% the Serbian state operates the Bor and Majdanpek complexes to the east, in the same metallogenic zone, on the same watersheds. In 2026 it applied to expand the Ju\u017eni revir open pit at Majdanpek: 126 million tonnes of ore, more than 407 million tonnes of waste rock, 13.5 years, mining within about 100 metres of houses, and relocation of the Mali Pek river. An environmental impact study has been ordered, with a one year deadline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Mlava and the Pek both end in the Danube.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Serbia does not need to import a cautionary tale. It has one next door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In March 2021 the Pek ran cloudy, red and green. RERI commissioned sampling of Mali Pek sludge through the Mining and Metallurgy Institute Bor. Copper came back at seventeen times the prescribed limit, arsenic at three and a half times, lead at nearly double. Surface and wastewater sampling by the Timok Public Health Institute was done at three points upstream of the mine, downstream of the wastewater inflow, and just after Mali Pek joins the Pek specifically to establish where it was coming from. The prosecutor’s office in Negotin issued an order requiring Zijin Copper and its responsible officer to pay one million dinars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One million dinars. Roughly eight and a half thousand euros. For copper at seventeen times the limit in a river<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is the enforcement regime that would supervise a gold mine above the strongest karst spring in the Carpatho Balkanides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Air tells the same story. Sulphur dioxide emissions and arsenic in particulate matter at Bor have risen since the Zijin takeover, and as researchers at the Technical Faculty in Bor have pointed out, higher production in an arsenic rich ore zone means proportionally more arsenic released. There is no technical fix for that arithmetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three structural problems make the standard reassurances hollow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The company grades its own homework.<\/strong> A 2011 amendment moved surface and groundwater quality analysis away from the state hydrometeorological service to laboratories engaged by the company itself. When the operator selects the lab, sets the sampling points and sets the sampling schedule, “all measurements within limits” is a statement about the measuring, not about the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plans contradict each other.<\/strong> \u017dagubica’s own spatial plan sets its priorities as environmental protection and the development of tourism, agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing. An earlier national decree covering this belt of the Bor metallogenic zone concluded that conditions for planning exploitation had not yet been met at the available technological level. The southern edge of the mine area overlaps ground previously earmarked for a Ku\u010daj\u2013Beljanica national park, and the area intersects three Important Bird Areas Homolje, Ku\u010daj\u2013Beljanica, and Veliki Kr\u0161 and Stol. Ornithological survey work in 2022 recorded 81 species there, 79 of them breeding, 31 listed under the Birds Directive and 74 under the Bern Convention. A special purpose spatial plan financed by the mining company overrides all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The people asking questions are being pressured.<\/strong> Activists in Homolje have been attacked with stones and metal bars while filming. A criminal complaint was filed over a protest performance. An activist has released audio of what he describes as an intimidation session in the basement of a building in \u017dagubica, in which he was pressed to stop opposing the mine and told his private messages had been read. Whatever any court eventually concludes about those specific incidents, a project that arrives alongside this pattern has already told you what kind of neighbour it intends to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An article that overclaims gets dismissed on its weakest sentence. So:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Say what you know. Ask for what is missing. That is a harder position to attack than certainty you cannot support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u010coka Rakita: about 41 tonnes of gold, over roughly eight producing years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vrelo Mlave: roughly one to two cubic metres per second, of drinkable water, forever provided nobody breaks the rock above it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gold is recoverable from a poisoned aquifer. An aquifer is not recoverable from anything. Once metals and acid enter a conduit karst system, there is no treatment train, no remediation plan, no reclamation bond and no seven year mine closure schedule that restores it. The water simply comes out different for as long as the water comes out.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In October 2025, Ecuador revoked the environmental licence for Loma Larga, another project in the same company’s portfolio, after mass protests in a p\u00e1ramo watershed that supplies drinking water to the region. The slogan there was water before gold<\/em>. It is not a slogan. It is a description of the ranking of two things, one of which is replaceable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The decision points are administrative, and they are open now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a place in the Gornjak gorge, on the middle course of the Mlava, where the river runs silent for about a hundred metres. People call it Voda koja \u0107uti<\/em> the water that keeps quiet. Legend puts the messenger from Kosovo there, bringing the news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are two ways for the water of Homolje to go quiet. One is the old way, in the gorge, and it is beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other one is permanent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eastern Serbia’s strongest spring sits directly downstream of a proposed open pit gold mine. In limestone country, that is not a manageable risk. It is a one way door to disaster. A spring you can drink from, one kilometre from town A kilometre from the centre of \u017dagubica, the Mlava rises out of a limestone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1078,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[165,47,140,62,141,48,132,135,60,61],"tags":[168,144],"class_list":["post-1076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-english-news","category-buducnost","category-ekocid-genocid","category-grupa-laznica","category-homolje","category-industrija","category-laznica-vs-dundee","category-laznica-vs-dundee-inc","category-laznicka-dijaspora","category-selo-se-brani","tag-homolje","tag-laznica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1076"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1122,"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076\/revisions\/1122"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laznica.org\/sr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\n\n\nA spring you can drink from, one kilometre from town<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWhy limestone changes everything<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nThe exploration phase is not harmless<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWho is actually operating here<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nThe precedent is thirty kilometres away<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nThe part of the system that is broken by design<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWhat we do not know, and should say so<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nThe asymmetry<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nWhat to do, and when<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n\n\n\nThe Vlach word<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nSources<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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