[narrator] Gold mining prodigy...
[Parker] And that's $3 million right there on the table.
[narrator] ...Parker Schnabel
is searching for his next big score...
[Parker] This is wild.
[bleep] yeah.
[narrator] ...deep in the jungles of Brazil.
There's a huge amount of conflict over mining.
The only way to understand is to come here and see it.
That is [bleep] cool.
And if there is a opportunity for us to invest,
then I wanna look at those opportunities.
Look, look. That's [bleep] gold.
[Parker] Look at these bad boys.
I did get fitted for a bulletproof vest, though.
That's a first.
[narrator] Previously on Parker's Trail...
[Parker] The revenue that would come out
of Serra Pelada would probably be $1.5 billion.
[Larissa] There is a lot of still legal issues
surrounding the cooperative.
[Parker] I don't really feel like hanging around here
while the two factions of the co-op do battle.
It'd be cool to see a big hard rock mine.
Holy [bleep].
I would hate to guess what this place is worth.
[Parker] It's too much of an investment.
I know that there's a ton of placer mining
in this country that we haven't seen,
and I think it would be good to see some of that.
[dramatic music playing]
Peixoto is kind of a tradition area
-for the mining. -[Parker] Right.
[Larissa] And it was founded around mining activities.
To get there, we are gonna cross,
it's like a very big and famous indigenous land,
which the name is Parque do Xingu.
[Parker] Yeah, it'd be cool to meet indigenous people.
[narrator] After three weeks exploring Brazil's
hard rock mining industry in Serra Pelada and Pocone,
Parker has just one week left in the country,
and he's decided on a final roll of the dice
in the placer mining hub of Peixoto de Azevedo.
In the north of Mato Grosso, the city is surrounded
by seven million acres of indigenous land.
[Parker] I do feel like this trip
got quite a wide range
of different mining operations in Brazil.
But this next part of the trip,
I really want to go
into the more regulated placer mines
that we're gonna recognize a lot better
in terms of relatability to our operation.
Hopefully, we can find interesting places,
and people, and opportunities.
That's the Peixoto just by the river.
It looks dirty.
[narrator] Billions of years ago,
Peixoto was a volcanic landscape.
Liquid magma erupted onto the surface
and crystalized into bands of gold-rich quartz.
Waterways then carried tiny fragments of gold
across the landscape,
forming a rich placer deposit.
Since 1978, miners have produced
over 250 tons of gold
worth $14 billion,
earning the town the reputation
of a placer mining paradise.
[Danny] Well, here we are.
-It's a neat little town, huh? -[Diego] Yeah.
-[Larissa] Yeah, very-- -[Danny] New town, new place,
new part of Brazil.
-Everyone excited? -[Diego] Yup.
Yeah, I'm excited for it.
I think we should go first with the co-op.
If I'm not wrong, the biggest of Brazil.
-Yes, another co-op. -[Danny] Yes.
I think this... The co-op here in Peixoto de Azevedo
is very different from the co-op in Serra Pelada.
They can give us, like, a good context and also, like,
indicate places for us to go and visit, you know?
[Danny] Yeah.
[dramatic music playing]
[narrator] Like most gold regions in Brazil,
the local cooperative controls the rights
to mine land in Peixoto.
[Diego speaking other language]
[in English] I have no idea what you just said, but okay.
[narrator] A crucial first stop for anyone
interested in investment.
[dramatic music playing]
Well, they've got a nicer building.
It's different from Serra Pelada, isn't it?
[chuckles] Hey, how you doin'?
[narrator] Gilson Camboim is the director.
[Gilson in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] He's showing us around.
[Gilson in Portuguese]
[in English] That's what we're looking for.
[laughter]
[Larissa] Copper... This is copper ore.
Wow.
Yeah, look at that.
[Gilson in Portuguese]
[Parker in English] As part of, like, the cooperative,
are they running the mine sites
or do they just do all of the, like, admin
for people that are doing the mining?
[in Portuguese]
-[Larissa in Portuguese] -[Gilson in Portuguese]
Mmm-hmm.
[narrator in English] The ground in Peixoto
belongs to landowners,
but the mining rights
sit with the co-op,
which supports over 200 individual operations
as well as funding projects
that help prevent illegal mining on indigenous land.
[in Portuguese]
[Parker in English] And I'm sure that they have the same problem
that I do, the people that mine illegally
reflects badly on the whole industry.
Exactly.
And they must take a royalty?
[in Portuguese]
[in English] All the members, they pay an annual fee...
-[Parker] Right. -...of 0.3%.
-That seems really low. -Yeah, it's low but actually,
they do have a lot of members
and they do produce a lot of gold,
so they have an income
to keep their office running and all that,
and since they produce more or less
four tons of gold per year.
And they do four tons?
[dramatic music playing]
They produce more placer gold than the entire Yukon.
Almost double. All the placer miners
in the Yukon are normally around 70,000 ounces a year
and four tons is like 130,000.
[narrator] Four tons of gold is worth $200 million.
They have some ground for me?
[laughter]
Let's go in that conference room
-and hack this out. -[in Portuguese]
[man speaking Portuguese]
[Danny in English] Did you see Parker's face
when they said four tons?
Now he knows what it's like to feel small.
Four tons, double the amount that comes out
of the entire Yukon.
This little litmus.
Four... four... four tons.
Four. Four?
Double. Wow.
[Parker] And this is a stark contrast to Serra Pelada.
They seem very well-organized and productive.
I mean, under the umbrella of this cooperative is,
you know, an industry bigger than the entire
placer mining industry in the Yukon, so...
[laughter]
[Parker] I just need to look for some ground.
Do you know of any local landowners
that might have ground for sale?
Yes.
[Larissa] Saying that they have a contact.
So I think we should give him a call.
That sounds good.
[in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] And Daniel is inviting you
to go to visit the mine site with him.
-Oh, perfect. -He's a geologist
so he'll know all your doubt... You can...
-Yeah. Good. -[Larissa] Answer...
-We can nerd out together. -[Larissa] Exactly.
[Larissa] Yeah. And we follow up on landowner leads.
-[Parker] Perfect. -Awesome.
Should we get... Should we get on the road?
Should we do this?
[Parker] Obrigado.
[dramatic music playing]
I feel like a miner with this hat on.
I feel like I'm one of the locals.
[Larissa laughs]
I reckon I'd blend in pretty well.
Yeah, you're well-blended, yeah.
-[Danny] Yeah. -For sure.
[narrator] While Danny and Larissa stay in town
to follow up with local landowners...
-[speaking Portuguese] -[speaking Portuguese]
-[Daniel speaking Portuguese]
[laughs]
[narrator in English] ...Parker and Diego follow the co-op geologist,
Daniel, to one of Peixoto's top performing mine sites.
[dramatic music playing]
If cattle didn't stink so much,
I would definitely be down
to be involved in some ranching of some sort, yeah.
[Diego] Really? I don't think it stinks.
I love the smell.
It's actually very nice.
[dramatic music playing]
[Diego] It's easier as organized as they say.
Let's go.
[in Portuguese]
-[Diego speaking Portuguese] -[in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] Clever Truilho is the son
of one of the co-op's founders,
and together with his father, owns the Pepita Mine,
named after the Portuguese word for nugget.
[Daniel in Portuguese]
[in English] He's gonna explain to us the process they have here.
[in Portuguese]
[Diego in English] What would you like to know?
What you want to ask to them?
[Parker] Everything.
[Diego in Portuguese]
-[in Portuguese] -[speaking Portuguese]
-[Clever in Portuguese] -[speaking Portuguese]
[dramatic music playing]
[Clever in Portuguese]
[in English] How many employees?
On each dredge, they have five workers,
three assistants.
[Parker] We have to open up way bigger areas.
Everything's frozen in the Yukon.
And so we can't sit in small areas like this.
[narrator] Unlike Parker's mine in the Yukon
where he must strip tons of frozen soil
to get down to gold rich pay dirt,
here, workers use water jets to blast strip pay dirt
containing gold directly to the bottom of each pit.
The slurry is then sucked up by dredges, or floating pumps,
and sent directly to one of six movable sluice runs
where the gold falls into the box.
It's a system that can be derigged
and rebuilt quickly to chase the gold.
[dramatic music playing]
[Daniel in Portuguese]
[chuckles]
[Diego in English] They have ripple.
[Clever in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[dramatic music playing]
[Parker in English] [bleep], it's so fine.
That's really hard gold to catch.
[Diego] Why does the gold float?
Because of the water is too muddy?
[Parker] No, fine gold floats.
It's surface tension.
[narrator] Fine gold like this can be so light
that it floats on water, making it hard to catch.
[Clever in Portuguese]
-[in English] And the gold just go... -Yeah.
There, yeah.
[Clever in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] To make sure he is getting
the maximum gold,
Clever often runs his waste tailings again.
[Parker] Do they clean up every day?
[Clever in Portuguese]
[Parker in English] Got you. We do it every 70 hours.
This is my least favorite part of the whole mining process.
[in Portuguese]
[speaking Portuguese, laughs]
[Diego speaking Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[in English] Half a gram per squared meter.
-[Parker] In eight hours? -[in Portuguese]
-[Clever in Portuguese] -[in English] In eight hours, yeah.
[Parker] Oh, wow.
I was pretty impressed with that pit.
[narrator] In his current pit,
Clever is mining $12,500 of gold
every eight hours,
the equivalent of $3 million a year.
[Parker] The gold, it's impressive.
Peixoto has a ton of positives.
It's pretty well-developed, landownership rights,
and laws seem to be fairly well-established.
It fits the bill quite well in a way that no area
we've ever been to before has.
Yeah, I could see us getting involved in here.
[dramatic music playing]
[bleep], this is nice.
[narrator] In a placer mining utopia
of Peixoto, where small-scale miners
produce double the gold of the entire Yukon...
[Parker] I'm loving the heavy window tint.
I'm gonna have to do this on our mine site.
[narrator] Parker has found some serious yellow iron...
[dramatic music playing]
[narrator] A brand new D7, 260 horsepower dozer.
These dozers are very new,
so that's half a million apiece, so there's, you know,
$1.5 million worth of equipment
sitting here, doing reclamation.
So, you know, obviously,
there's some money in the ground.
[narrator] These 30-ton machines
are a critical part of miner Clever's operation.
First, for stripping ground to get to pay dirt,
then for reclamation by refilling the mined pit
before planting native vegetation.
In this... The area, the way it was before mining,
so for example, this area was cattle,
so it was only grass for feeding the cattle.
And they will leave it back again as cattle area.
[narrator] Reclamation is a non-negotiable part
of running a mine in Peixoto.
[Clever in Portuguese]
[in English] In all the mine sites we've been to
in South America, this is the first time
we've been to one, like, actively doing reclamation.
It's really nice to see.
So I'm definitely interested in planning something.
You just need a piece of really good ground.
[line ringing]
-[Marcelo speaking] -[narrator] Back in town.
[in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] ...Larissa's hot on the trail
of available land that Parker could buy.
[in Portuguese]
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[Marcelo speaking Portuguese]
[in English] It sounded positive.
Yes, it really did.
He's a landowner.
I asked if he could meet us later in the hotel.
Mmm-hmm. Wicked. Perfect.
-Nice one, Larissa. -Yeah.
[Clever in Portuguese]
[in English] Yeah.
I could sit in there all day.
It's the one part of the mine site
I miss when I'm away.
That's a nice tractor, too.
-[Clever speaking Portuguese] -[Parker in English] Yeah.
Really nice.
One of the nicest dozers I've ever ran.
My first impression of Peixoto
is that it's the right place to be.
Everybody's pretty chill. It actually kind of has
a pretty similar vibe to the Yukon.
And the big thing is, like, how much ground
is still left here, you know?
That's one of the big questions.
[dramatic music playing]
I really don't know what to expect.
[narrator] Back at the crew hotel...
[Danny] We just need him to turn up, don't we?
[narrator] Danny and Larissa wait
for one of Peixoto's biggest landowners.
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[Larissa speaking Portuguese]
-[speaking Portuguese] -[speaking Portuguese]
[narrator in English] Marcelo Valbenocci
is a self-made local businessman...
-[Danny in Portuguese] -[speaking Portuguese]
[narrator in English] ...who owns over 2,500 acres
of prime ground in Peixoto.
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
-[Larissa] Mmm-hmm. -[in Portuguese]
[in English] He's saying that he sees a lot of opportunities still...
for gold mining and all that.
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] Marcelo specializes in virgin ground,
land that has never been mined before
and could be rich in gold.
-[in Portuguese] -[Larissa in English] Yeah. Wow.
-[Danny] All in right now. -[Larissa] Yeah.
[Danny] Oh, my [bleep].
-[in Portuguese] -[Danny in English] Wow.
[in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] These nuggets are worth over $40,000 combined.
[Danny] I think it'd be really cool
if we could call him again to meet up with Parker.
Yeah.
[in Portuguese]
[in English] He's saying that he's away for a couple of days,
but we can meet him after that.
When they come back, we'll have a chat with them
and see if we can organize it.
-[Larissa] Yeah. -Thanks so much for your time.
-[Larissa in Portuguese] -[Danny] Obrigado.
[in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] So we've just met Marcelo.
He was explaining to us that he has land around,
and it seems he's been here for a long time,
so that's why I think it's important
for Parker to meet him.
-[Danny] How's it going? -[Larissa] Hey.
How was your day?
[Diego] That mining site was completely different
-from the other one we-- -[Larissa] Was it?
[Danny] Really?
Yeah. The first outfit that I've seen
in South America that actually made sense.
Awesome.
We've had a wicked day.
-[Diego] Really? -Yeah.
Oh, yeah, we did a lot of stuff.
You just missed landowner Marcelo.
Oh, my [bleep]. I was just fondling
Marcelo's nugs that...
Not even 15 minutes ago.
[Larissa] I think you should meet him.
[Parker] That sounds good.
So today we went to this guy Clever's mine.
That was interesting.
There was a bunch of pretty nice gear there.
And so, it felt like gold from the ground
was paying for all that stuff.
And that's a good sign. It means we're in a good area.
It sounds like the opportunity
to talk to Marcelo,
and hopefully look at some properties
and get some real leads.
So excited to check out more.
[Danny] Cool.
Right. Get some sleep and then hit it tomorrow. Yeah?
-[Larissa] Yeah. -[Danny] Awesome.
[Larissa] We had a very productive day
here in Peixoto de Azevedo.
Clearly the ground here is very good,
but we need to talk
and let's see what we come up to do tomorrow.
I really want to show a indigenous land
to Parker, Diego, and Danny.
So let's see what we find.
[dramatic music playing]
Wow. This is amazing. This is cool, isn't it?
I'm so excited.
It's good to be here.
I don't think you have a complete experience
of the Brazilian Amazon
if you don't get to meet an indigenous community
and learn something from them.
[narrator] With landowner Marcelo out of town for two days,
Parker and his crew had 170 miles east
to the mighty Xingu River in the heartland
of the indigenous Kayapó people.
[Parker] That's so cool.
There is a pretty big,
well-established indigenous community
here in Mato Grosso,
and for me, there's always a lot
of local impact concerns
both environmentally and socially.
So it's really important to just go and meet with them
and sit down and hear it
straight from the horse's mouth, if you will.
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] With ancestral lands
across Mato Grosso and Pará,
the Kayapó people have only been in contact
with the outside world for 70 years.
[Danny] Different world.
-[Larissa] Yeah. -[Danny] Purest, whitest sand.
[Larissa] We are inside indigenous land now,
so we should be respectful.
This is a Kayapó village.
-[Danny] Kayapó village. -[Larissa] Yeah.
[rooster crowing]
They kind of divide the activities in who does what.
You see like all the women, they work together,
while men, they have other activities that they do here.
[Diego in Portuguese]
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] Kayapó existence relies on river fishing,
hunting, and foraging the land around them
to source food and natural medicines.
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[in English] This is manioc.
[Danny] Wow.
[Larissa] And then they're drying it
like to make the farofa manioc powder.
[narrator] Manioc, or cassava, is a root vegetable
commonly crushed into a powder
and used to make the flatbreads
served with most meals.
[Parker] That is awesome.
[Larissa] We should try to find Megaron.
[narrator] Larissa has set up a meeting
with the well-known Kayapó chief here named Megaron.
-[Larissa in Portuguese] -[Engri in Portuguese]
[Larissa in Portuguese]
-[in Portuguese] -[Larissa in Portuguese]
-[Engri speaking] -[Larissa speaking]
[speaking Portuguese]
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[Engri in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] He can take us to Megaron,
but he say like, that's on the other side of the village.
We need to cross a little creek.
-[Danny] Yup. Cool. -[Larissa] Yeah.
-Sounds good. -He can take us there.
[Danny] Yeah, that'd be amazing.
[Engri in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[Engri in Portuguese]
[in English] He's saying that all the trees we see here,
he planted all of them when he was a kid.
Wow.
Must be pretty cool wandering through a forest
that you planted as a kid.
[Larissa] Megaron is super famous
indigenous leader in Brazil.
He's fighting against illegal loggers and illegal miners.
You should be careful here.
You should not step here.
-We need to go that way. -[Danny] Okay.
They're invading the Kayapó territory
and think it's important to show Parker.
[Diego in Portuguese]
[Parker in English] Here we are.
[Larissa] The chief is here.
[Danny] Oh, wow.
[Megaron in Portuguese]
[Larissa in Portuguese]
-Parker. -[Larissa] Parker.
[both greeting in Portuguese]
-Diego. -[Diego] Diego.
[Megaron speaking Portuguese]
[Diego speaking Portuguese]
[in English] How many indigenous people live like in this area
or in this particular park?
[in Portuguese]
[Parker in English] Well, quite a few.
-Yeah. -[Larissa] Yeah. It's a lot.
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[in English] Well, he's saying like Kayapó people,
they are really suffering
because of illegal miners in their territory.
They destroyed the land. They pollute the rivers.
It also affected the way they hunt
because they don't have as much animals to hunt anymore.
[narrator] Since 2018,
illegal gold mining has spread like wildfire
in the indigenous lands of Brazil,
especially in the states of Pará and Roraima
further north with 50,000 acres destroyed
and polluted every year.
Because indigenous communities
rely on harvesting food
and hunting in the forest to survive,
these invasions of protected land
have devastating effects,
including malnutrition and illness.
[in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] A cause Megaron seeks to bring to light
through his work.
[in Portuguese]
[in English] There's a lot of people in the world
that, uh, no matter what, it's never enough.
[Larissa] In Pará, since he's very involved
in solving conflicts
between Kayapó people and miners.
[in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] They wanna live in peace.
They have everything they need here.
They want to protect and preserve these lands.
[Parker] Well, these guys were here first
and for a long time.
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[in English] They don't face here, in this area,
problems with illegal miners
because they don't accept invaders in the territory.
[Parker] That's good.
[Megaron in Portuguese]
[in English] He says it's important that us
with the camera show the world
and spread the message that what they really want
is to be left alone.
They wanna live in peace.
Just thank him for his time and for the, um, warm welcome.
Mmm-hmm.
[Parker] You know, I live in a community
that has pretty strong indigenous roots.
[speaking Portuguese]
And visiting a place like that makes me feel a bit sad.
They have to try so hard to just get left alone.
-[Larissa in Portuguese] -[Megaron in Portuguese]
[Larissa speaking Portuguese]
[Engri in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[Engri in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] He's saying that his wife over there,
she knows how to do the body painting.
If you wanna do some body paintings.
Yeah.
We should do that.
[dramatic music playing]
[Parker] I do really like getting a very different take
on what life's all about.
Can you ask them what this means?
Some of them are represent animals.
It's a tortoise painting.
[Parker] That's cool.
You know, the beginning in this trip,
we filmed with a bunch of illegal gold miners
and now we're with a village of indigenous people
who have been in this area
for, I'm assuming, thousands of years.
And that's definitely hard to reconcile
visiting illegal miners,
understanding their issues,
then coming here and visiting indigenous people,
understanding the potential impact
that mining has on them, right?
And I think that's why it's important
that laws are enforced.
I really do.
And it's good that in this area,
it sounds like they have a pretty hard line
that they draw of keeping industry out
so that they can live the way they wanna live.
[Larissa] The chief was explaining
that when a community is in peace,
they do the body paintings, and I'm like, yeah.
Yeah, much better than having to do it before going to war.
-Yeah. -Yeah. [laughs]
-[Larissa] You like it? -Obrigado.
[tribal music playing]
Okey-dokey. All right. Let's load her up.
Awesome.
-[Danny] Okay. -Bye.
Ciao.
Back on the road.
[Larissa] It was my favorite part of the trip.
[Parker] Yeah.
I love the idea of wandering through your own forest.
I'm gonna have my own forest.
-[Danny] Oh, yeah? -Yeah. My dad planted
-like 5,000 trees like 30 years ago. -Really?
-[Danny] No. -Yeah.
[Danny] Ah, that's cool.
-[Larissa] But it is in Alaska? -That's so cool.
-It's kind of nice? -[Danny] Yeah.
Yeah, it is nice.
[Parker] Should we go see Marcelo then?
[narrator] Heading back to Peixoto
after two days in indigenous territory,
Parker is on the hunt for his own slice
of this mining utopia.
It's probably one of the better areas we've ever been to
in all the years of doing these trips.
This year, volume of gold being mined,
the grade of the ground.
The next step is see if we can find
some perspective ground.
I'm very excited.
[narrator] Larissa has managed to secure a meeting
for Parker with one of the biggest landowners in the area.
See? He's got a lot going on, Marcelo, isn't he?
He owns a lot of land around
and also he's involved in mining,
but that's pretty much what we know.
[tense music playing]
[Diego] I think it's one of these places.
-I think it's here. -[Larissa] Oh, it's a nice house.
[Parker] Well, it looks like he's done pretty well for himself.
[Diego] Let's go.
Okay. Let's go and see what he has to say.
[speaking Portuguese] Mr. Parker.
[speaking Portuguese]
[narrator in English] Marcelo Valbenocci has lived in Peixoto
for 30 years,
slowly accumulating a large portfolio of land.
-Beautiful house. -It's gorgeous, isn't it?
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] He's inviting us to see his land.
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[Parker in English] Sweet. That'd be great.
[narrator] Marcelo has a piece of ground
he thinks Parker may be interested in,
seven miles north of the town.
[Danny] Okay. Let's go.
[Parker] Vamoose?
Nice truck.
I always like to see people who have done really well
and they have a nice big, fancy house.
And give a good reference for the area
in terms of this being the real deal.
[Danny] These cars always make me feel really small.
[Larissa chuckles] Yeah.
[Parker] I wanna go where the most gold is.
-[Larissa] Yeah. -[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] Uh, he's saying that
-there's gold everywhere. -[laughter]
[Parker] What's his involvement with mining?
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[narrator in English] Marcelo has developed a 2,500-acre empire
in the region, a mixture of mines and farmland.
[in Portuguese]
[in English] He say that all we see here with the soy crops
there's also minerals in it.
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] So that's his property.
[narrator] Marcelo's 50-hectare plot
currently planted with soy crop,
sits right next to a working mine site.
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[Parker in English] Well, this is nice.
[in Portuguese]
[in English] He's saying that the real gold is here.
[Parker] What was the grade like in this?
What kind of gold per square meter was this?
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
-[Larissa in English] Over five grams per... -[Parker] Oh, wow.
-...square meter. -That's really good.
[narrator] Roughly five grams a yard
is nearly eight times the gold of Parker's claim in the Yukon.
-This is not his operation... -[Parker] Mmm-hmm.
so you'd have to start
a new one over there where he has the land.
[narrator] This previously mined pit...
struck gold-bearing gravels from an ancient river.
The plot Marcelo is offering Parker
is just across the road.
And may also sit on the ancient riverbed.
If the yields are the same,
Marcelo's plot could make Parker a potential
$160 million payday.
[Larissa] Now you see the crops,
but in the future, you see a mining pit.
[Parker] This has not been like
drilled or explored for mining?
[in Portuguese]
[in English] Okay. I really appreciate that.
All right. Should we, uh, part ways?
[Diego] Yeah.
[Larissa] I think Parker really liked what he saw,
especially he was very curious about the gold potential.
This is a very good area
for Parker to invest.
This place is chocker full of gold, isn't it?
Yeah.
How many ounces of gold would you be taking
if you were running your plant here?
At the rate that we mine, it was like
15 ounce an hour--
What are you running an hour?
-Two. -Two? Like, [bleep] mental,
seven times.
[Parker] It's a very productive mining area.
I've always said, if you could find gold
that has like somewhat close grades
to what we're mining in the Yukon
without the problems of seasonality
and permafrost that we have,
you could do really well.
[dramatic music playing]
[bleep]. What is that? Hey, everybody,
everybody stop... Everybody stop, please.
There's an accident on the road.
Please everybody stop.
[bleep]
[bleep] Going to check.
[Frederique speaking]
[Diego speaking]
[Frederique speaking]
[Diego speaking]
[tense music playing]
What do you think of this guy?
What's your hunch?
I think he is great.
-[Danny] You like him? -Yeah.
[narrator] Morning in Peixoto,
Parker and landowner Marcelo
get together to talk business.
First of all, like, thank you
for talking to us about mining around here.
[in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] He says he's honored, uh, receiving us here
and also everyone in the region likes you
and loves the show.
We're always looking for ground
and this area is really intriguing to me.
You know, I like the people here.
I like the, uh...
-I mostly like the climate. It's a little hot. -[Larissa laughs]
But it's just a matter of how much money.
[dramatic music playing]
Can I ask how big the whole price
of the 50-hectare area?
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[Larissa in English] For the 50 hectares,
he would negotiate that for six million reais.
All right.
[narrator] At $1 million
for roughly 100 acres,
it's over five times
what Parker paid for his land in the Yukon.
And he's saying now that the, um, price of land
in the... In the region, not only here, but in Mato Grosso
as a whole increased a lot in the past years.
Got you.
I would love to be able to go test the ground.
[Larissa] There's still need to be a lot of drilling research.
[Marcelo in Portuguese]
[in Portuguese]
[in English] Like if somebody has a soy field,
-you can't just go mine... -[Larissa] No, you can't.
-through the whole thing, can you? -[Larissa] No, you can't. No.
[narrator] Parker cannot test the claim
until after the spring harvest is taken
in five months' time.
[Parker] It's not cheap here.
You wanna buy 100 acres of land,
it's like a million bucks.
And we mine 100 acres a year, so...
that math adds up but the odds of being able to buy
100-acre block that is minable is like probably very slim.
The amount of risk that you take on is insane.
[narrator] For a deal to go through now,
Parker would need to buy the land
without testing for gold.
[Parker] I think that there's a lot of potential,
but there's definitely a lot to think about for me.
[Larissa in Portuguese]
[Parker in Portuguese]
[Parker in English] The opportunity Marcelo has here
in terms of my timelines and risk profile,
it's... not the right thing to do.
[dramatic music playing]
[Danny] How did everyone sleep?
[Larissa] I slept really well.
That felt a little bit deflating yesterday in some ways, didn't it?
[narrator] Parker's ruled out a land deal with Marcelo.
Now, the crew must decide
whether to stay on in Peixoto.
[Danny] It feels like back to square one, but...
at the end of our trip--
Oh, but we still have some time.
-Not much. -[Larissa] Not much.
What are the options?
Continue exploring this area.
Especially after yesterday,
I feel like the ground does look
really interesting, right?
I think that's also a reason,
like, people here are doing so well.
The cooperative and also the miners
because here the gold is easier to get.
Yeah, I think we should just take a stab
-at meeting a few people around here. -[Larissa] Hmm.
[Parker] I mean, just about every trip we've been on,
this area is the most intriguing and interesting.
There's a huge amount of gold coming out of the ground here.
[Danny] Sounds good. Cool.
[Parker] And to make our business work in the Yukon,
it took us having boots on the ground
and meeting owner after owner.
Cool.
[Parker] If we wanna get serious about finding ground down here,
that's what we're gonna have to do. Going all in on this
for the last week. There is lot of opportunity.
But, you have to be here and you have to live it.
-[Danny] Let's get on it. -[Parker] Let's go.
[Danny] [bleep]
Oh, my [bleep]. That's massive.
[narrator] On the season finale of Parker's Trail.
[suspenseful music playing]
I'm really impressed.
[Danny] Oh, my [bleep]. Look at that!
[Larissa] Oh, wow.
There's a huge amount of opportunity
in gold mining here.
I really would love to put some money
into something here.
[in Portuguese]
[in English] Well, let's take some microphones off.