The largest amount of gold in the country is stored in a place for which everyone can know the address. Each year, millions of people pass by without knowing it.
It is a myth that always makes you dream, an timeless fascination. Talking about gold nourishes the collective imagination and creates many fantasies. The most precious metal is still highly sought after. To have it can make it possible to earn a lot of money since the kilo is currently exchanged for € 90,000.
In France, several regions are still golden resources. In mainland France, the Pyrenees, the Cévennes but, above all, the Armorican massif are the main territories always providing this metal. Far from France, but still in France, it is Guyana which is a real gold mine, where extraction farms still exist. However, it is not on the other side of the Atlantic that the largest extract gold reserve exists, but in mainland France.
It is a space of 10,000m², large as a football stadium, buried 28 meters underground, under a water table, that 2,436 tonnes of gold hide. The first reserve in France, the most important fourth in the world. Treasury valuation: 219 billion euros! The magot is enormous, colossal even, and yet barely more substantial than the fortune of Bernard Arnault (190 billion).
Thousands of people are bordering on this treasure every day without knowing it. It is indeed in the heart of Paris, a stone’s throw from the Palais de l’Elysée and the Louvre museum, that the State gold reserve hides. Its location is public: Hôtel de Toulouse, 1 rue de la Vrillière, 75001 Paris. In its postal aspect, the place seems unknown. It is actually the headquarters of the Banque de France.
To access these golden meanders, you have to pass turrets, borrow narrow corridors that can be obstructed and use elevators. Each time appears in front of the visitors of imposing armored doors, one of which weighs 7 tonnes and swivels slowly. And when the room finally opens up to you, 720 pillars appear, supporting a 6m50 thick frame, made of limestone, concrete and steel, as shown A TV report in 1950.
Then reveal the 100m long corridors serving equally protected parts, containing the various bars of 12.5kg each. Preciously guarded gold belongs to France, but also to other countries, whose identities are not known.
Do not think of being able to access this play for heritage days. Those who can be handpicked. Only the governor of the Banque de France, his seven employees of the Gold Service, and five to ten other people can go down there. Among which, of course, the President of the Republic, most likely the Minister of the Economy, or the Minister of Public Accounts.