Home renovations are usually a money sink. It’s not often that you end up profiting from one, let alone before it’s even truly begun. That’s what happened when a man in France started digging a hole that would one day become a swimming pool in his backyard. He literally struck gold, about $800,000 worth.
Pool’s gold, if you will.
CBS News reports (with contributions from Agence France-Presse) that the find happened back in May in the small town of Neuville-sur-Saône, near Lyon. The man reportedly hit something harder than dirt and unearthed five gold bars and a stash of coins, all neatly packed in plastic bags.
Instead of sneaking off to become a snooty secret rich person, he called the authorities…who told him he could keep it.
He Just Wanted a Pool. He got $800,000 in Gold.
That’s because under France’s 19th-century civil code, anything hidden and unclaimed that’s discovered by chance belongs to whoever finds it on their own property. If you’ve got a slice of ancient European history on your property, it’s yours to do what you want with it.
Local police traced the gold’s origins and confirmed it hadn’t been stolen. Records showed it was legally purchased and melted down at a nearby refinery about 15 to 20 years ago. The previous homeowner has since passed away, leaving behind a wildly lucrative garden.
Current gold prices are around $4,017 per ounce, which puts the value of the find at about three-quarters of $1 million. For context, that’s about what it costs to own a decent apartment in Paris.
While finding a bunch of old gold worth a fortune in your backyard isn’t exactly guaranteed if you were to start digging around with a shovel, it does seem to happen more often than you’d think. Just last year, in 2024, a couple in Northern California found $10 million worth of rare 19th-century coins buried on their property. The year before, a guy in Germany found $150,000 worth of gold in his apartment.
If you’ve been putting off any home repairs that you’re afraid might cost you a pretty penny, maybe you’ll hit a rich vein that ends up paying for all the repairs and then some.
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