Geamăna, Romania: The Village Drowned in Toxic Sludge

Geamăna was a small Orthodox farming village in the Sesii Valley of the Apuseni Mountains in Alba County, Transylvania, home to several hundred families who lived by subsistence agriculture and herding around their village church. In 1978 Romania’s communist government ordered the valley evacuated — not to build a reservoir for water or power, but to use it as a tailings pond for the enormous Roșia Poieni copper mine being developed nearby, one of the largest copper deposits in Europe.

Residents — variously reported as around 400 families, more than a thousand people in total — were offered modest compensation and told to leave so the valley could become a settling basin for the mine’s waste. From 1978 onward a rising tide of tailings — a slurry laced with heavy metals, cyanide and sulfuric acid — began to fill the valley, slowly burying homes, gardens, fields and the cemetery beneath a thick, multicoloured sludge. Over the following decades the level climbed by roughly a metre a year; by the 1990s it had reached the village church, leaving only its spire and a scatter of rooftops protruding above the surface.

Unlike a water reservoir, this flood does not recede. Because the Roșia Poieni mine has continued to operate, the tailings keep accumulating and the toxic lake keeps rising, threatening even the church spire that has become the village’s grim landmark. A handful of residents — only around twenty by recent accounts — long refused to leave, clinging to houses on the upper slopes above the advancing waste, while the once-fertile valley has been transformed into a basin of rust-red, ochre, green and turquoise water whose colours come from the iron, copper and sulfur compounds suspended in it. The basin now spans well over 130 hectares and holds tens of millions of tonnes of waste.

The site has become an internationally recognised symbol of the human and environmental cost of mining. Photographers, journalists and environmental campaigners are drawn to the eerie, oddly beautiful lake and to the half-sunken church, which stands as a monument both to the village that was sacrificed and to a contamination that, unlike floodwater, will not drain away.