From a Taschen.com online release:

“Salgado’s photographs project an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. We know that the mine at Serra Pelada is now closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.”

For a decade, Serra Pelada evoked the long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets—and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs. This signed edition gathers the complete black-and-white portfolio in impeccable, grand-scale, museum-quality reproductions.

To read more: https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/86908/facts.sebastio_salgado_gold.htm