Amélie Poinssot

GndevazGndevaz, Jermuk (Armenia). The mountainside beneath our feet, covered with apricot trees, is a brilliant green. Along the path, apple and plum trees are laden with fruit. Bears live in the area: ‘Mayis’ – not his real name – who is working on a house being built here, says that on several occasions he has come across their droppings and discarded fruit skins and stones. On his phone, he shows Mediapart footage he has taken of a deer and a bezoar goat (a threatened species found in the Caucasus and Central Asia) on the mountainside opposite, which he likes to gaze at in the evenings while taking a break.

He rarely looks downhill. A few hundred metres down the slope, nature is starting to disappear. Articulated lorries move back and forth between piles of earth, dirt tracks and an enormous crater filled with liquid, while gigantic black tarpaulins cover a vast area of land on an adjoining slope.

The Amulsar open-pit gold mine, at which preparatory work has been under way since 2024, officially opened on October 10th. Barely ten days before the start of COP17, the United Nations biodiversity summit that has been taking place in Yerevan, the Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan came to inaugurate the mine in person and announce the first gold extractions.

The area contains what is believed to be Armenia’s second-largest deposit of gold. The country, situated at the southern end of the Caucasus mountain range, has been extracting minerals and rare earth elements from its rich subsoil on an industrial scale since Soviet times.

The Amulsar open-pit gold mine, below orchards. © Photo Amélie Poinssot / Mediapart

According to people we have spoken to, more than 1,300 people are already working at the site, around 80 of whom live in the neighbouring village of Gndevaz. Yet eight years ago, when mining operations were originally due to begin, a massive local protest movement blocked the access road to the site for two years. Young people in particular took turns standing guard, in a movement supported by the country’s environmental organisations.

But in September 2020, the war launched by neighbouring Azerbaijan to recapture the Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh brought the blockade to an end. Young men volunteered to defend their country against the offensive by their bitter enemies, society had more pressing concerns, and some of these volunteers would later return home in coffins.

Meanwhile, Lydian Armenia, a subsidiary of Jersey-registered offshore company Lydian International Limited, which had secured a government concession to operate the mine, refused to give up.

Indeed, the company quietly continued to press ahead despite a 2024 ruling by an Armenian court that an environmental impact assessment for the mine’s expansion had been conducted unlawfully, alarming findings by various environmental organisations, a complaint lodged by several NGOs in 2020 under the Bern Convention – an international treaty protecting wildlife – and the withdrawal from the project by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) .

The company had the backing of a government that had acquired a 12.5% stake in the project and which worked behind the scenes, away from media scrutiny. The inauguration itself went ahead without a single protest.

Climate of silence

In reality, an atmosphere of fear had taken hold, and silence now reigns locally. A few miles away, at the largest hotel complex in the spa resort of Jermuk, staff told Mediapart that it “wasn’t the right time” to answer our questions.

Yet the establishment had in the past spoken out against the project and expressed solidarity with the protest movement. One of its concerns then was that mining would drive tourists away from a region renowned for the quality of its natural springs.

In Gndevaz, Mihrdat Nersisyan is one of the few people who still dares to speak to journalists. “I was hoping that holding COP17 in Armenia was going to encourage the government to close this mine. Instead, it’s doing exactly the opposite… It’s depressing,” he tells us on the terrace of his house.

He believes that mining at the site, which is around 1,500 metres above sea level, will cause an irreversible disaster.

Mihrdat Nersisyan on the terrace of his house in Gndevaz, October 22nd 2026. © Photo Amélie Poinssot / Mediapart

“Toxic substances present in the mountain will end up in the groundwater and the Arpa River, which flows below the mine: uranium, radium and thulium,” explains the retired engineer. “And then there are the substances used to extract gold from the rock: cyanide and sulphuric acid. But what we should really fear is contamination on a massive scale, extending far beyond Gndevaz and Jermuk.”

In this dry land, where the water comes from the mountains, Soviet infrastructure projects in the 1960s and 1970s involved digging water tunnels through the mountains. Since then, water from the Arpa River has been channelled northwards to the vast Lake Sevan through a 50-kilometre (31-mile) tunnel from the large Kechut reservoir. This is itself connected by a 20-kilometre (12.4-mile) underground conduit to the Spandarian reservoir to the south-east, allowing other valleys to be irrigated.

In other words, toxic substances could travel far beyond the mine itself. Sulphuric acid could also cause serious damage to the tunnels. Mihrdat says he does not want to see his local river turn orange, as has happened near the Kapan gold mine in the south of the country, which has been operating for decades.

In 2019, a report by the Bulgarian wildlife conservation organisation Balkani also highlighted shortcomings in Lydian Armenia’s environmental impact assessment and identified threatened species in the area for which habitat preservation is crucial.

There are far too many species to list them all here. Besides the brown bear and bezoar goat already mentioned, several species whose conservation status is highly precarious can be found in the area, including the bearded vulture, wolves, otters and lynx.

The extremely rare leopard, of which a handful remain in Armenia, was last spotted in the area in 2014. That was high up on the ridges of Amulsar, which in Armenian has the somewhat misleading name “barren mountain”.

The processing pond halfway up Mount Amulsar. © Photo Amélie Poinssot / Mediapart

Mihrdat used to be director of the local textile factory, which closed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, apart from agriculture, there are no jobs in the area, and he understands why some villagers have eventually resigned themselves to the mine’s arrival. “People know it’s dangerous to work there, but they have no choice,” he says. “The village is now deeply divided over the issue.”

Welcome jobs despite risks

‘Manvel’ – not his real name – is one of these local workers. We meet him in the courtyard of his family home, where he is busy repairing the engine of a car that has already had four or five owners. His mother, ‘Arpi’, his wife, ‘Lilit’, and his sister-in-law, ‘Varsenik’, are there with him.

He has been working as a site vehicle operator at the mine for five months. He has no idea what minerals lie beneath the ground or what chemicals are used to extract them, and is simply glad to have found work just a few minutes from home.

“We work four days on, four days off, and the pay’s good. Before, I worked on construction sites in Yerevan,” he says. The capital is more than two and a half hours away by road. He is not concerned about the mine’s environmental impact, and neither is his wife, who worked in the mine’s canteen for a few weeks. “The children of people who opposed the mine are working there today,” she says.

There’s no such thing as clean mining. The impact on biodiversity is always disastrous.

Arman Vermishyan, director of the Caucasus Nature Fund

Arpi, however, is under no illusions. Although she is happy to have her son close to home, she knows that mining can pose health risks. “It frightens me, but what can we do?” she asks.

Varsenik, her other daughter-in-law, is even more sceptical. “I have a daughter who already has health problems,” she says with a wry smile. “She’s studying English, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure she works somewhere far away from here.”

Lydian Armenia uses a cyanide-based extraction method, which is banned in some European countries and subject to “strict conditions” in the European Union because of its toxicity. “This is what’s known as heap leaching,” explains Artur Grigoryan, an environmental lawyer who recently wrote an article about the mine.

“The raw material is stored in the open air and washed with a cyanide-based solution in a large containment area. This method is particularly common with rocks that have a very low concentration of gold, as is the case at Amulsar.”

The company’s veil of secrecy

The signs erected by Lydian Armenia around the site give a misleading impression of what is happening there. “Archaeological site,” they announce. “Do not touch, move or damage archaeological or historical remains.”

Why are these warnings there? What measures has the company taken to compensate for the environmental damage caused by its operations? Has it revised its plans in light of the many criticisms of its initial environmental impact assessment?

Signs near the mining site read ‘Archaeological site’. © Photo Amélie Poinssot / Mediapart

We don’t know. Lydian Armenia, which we contacted around 12 days before our visit, has not responded to our requests for a meeting.

At the entrance to the site, where we again asked to speak to a company representative, security personnel were immediately dispatched to firmly turn us away, but not before gathering as much information as possible about us and the translator accompanying us. We were then followed by car wherever we went, until we finally left the area and headed back towards Yerevan.

“The government should have demanded a new environmental impact assessment, but it never did,” says Armenian environmental activist Anna Shahnazaryan. Wearing a ‘Save Amulsar’ T-shirt, she had been turned away by Armenian police the previous day at the entrance to the COP’s “blue zone” in Yerevan, the heavily secured area where official discussions and diplomatic negotiations take place. She was due to take part in a round-table discussion and had the necessary accreditation. UN officials eventually intervened to allow her in. “We have to keep fighting, to believe in our own power and in the ability of local communities to resist,” she tells Mediapart.

Mineral resources account for more than half of Armenia’s exports, and their extraction has already devastated entire ecosystems, as in Alaverdi in the north, where copper was mined for decades. Today, around ten companies operate some 20 active mining sites. The largest complex is in Kajaran, in the south, where copper and molybdenum deposits are extracted.

“There’s no such thing as clean mining. The impact on biodiversity is always disastrous,” stresses Arman Vermishyan, director of the Caucasus Nature Fund.

These are the consequences that Pashinyan’s government has chosen to ignore (see their response here in the appendix). Or perhaps, by getting the mine up and running, it was deliberately trying to catch the attention of the many financiers attending the COP? In just a few weeks, snow will cover the mountain, halting all mining operations until spring. And by Lydian Armenia’s own admission, another 100 million dollars is needed to complete the investment in Amulsar.

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• The original French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter

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