There’s Gold in Bugarach Rocks at €1,500/Kg

Some say thar’s gold in them thar Bugarach rocks and are offering ‘authentic hand-selected stones’ at €1,500/Kg giving the village Mayor a further headache to add to Mayan “apocalypse” mania running rife in Cathar country.

Jean-Pierre Delord holds a pricey rock

(Read more online here) Worried about the imminent end of the world?

Buy a kilo of best vintage Bugarach rock and magically gain protection suggested one French website. This drew an angry response from Mayor Jean-Pierre Delord concerned about damage carpetbaggers moving in to exploit the worldwide publicity about the tiny Aude hideaway were doing to its reputation.

And now for some Bugarech gold dust (Click to enlarge)

Cashing in on credulity the websites — one with the offending page now taken down, the other radically revised — offered to sell expensive Bugarach rock pendants designed to protect a wearer from the apocalypse or promised  to deliver “authentic” certified Bugarach stones guaranteeing protection, for a paltry 1500 euros a kilo!

The activities of these Internet ‘entrepreneurs’ was recently exposed by media reports in La Dépêche and on the LCI TV channel — see below.

Following the LCI report the Mayor laid a formal complaint with the gendarmerie — and now the LE PIC DE BUGARACH rock sales page of one website, www.embereziaone.fr is no longer accessible while the other, www.2012bugarach.com has fundamentally revised its page to remove its rocky offer.

According to La Dépêche the Mayor could live with the news that some of the villagers were trying to sell their houses for, well rather more than the market value, and not dignify with a response, numerous requests for licenses to set up pizza pitches at the bottom of the trails leading to the mountain summit, but blatant rocky ripoffs were another matter.

Indeed his patience has been sorely tried by others seizing the moment on the www.leboncoin.fr website, the French equivalent of E-bay, where one optimist is offering his greenhouses for sale as apocalypse-safe accommodation, another says for €1000 punters can acquire “a 100 m2 underground cellar″ and a third will provide a “VIP bunker equipped with five years of self-sufficiency, communications, TV and able to sleep 10, at a monthly rent of € 35,000 but no time wasters please”.

The images below of no-longer-available offers, are from a France 3 TV report.

The 'embereziaone' website no longer sells its Bugarach jewellry

2012bugarach.com dropped its gold dust-priced rocks after complaints

Ah well the budding entrepreneurs might well say, it was good while it lasted, nothing wrong with a bit of free enterprise.

Story: Ken Pottinger
editorial@french-news-online.com

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