Cool Finds Hikers Stumble Upon Gold Coins and Treasures That Could Be Worth $340,000 After discovering the 15-pound cache while hiking in the Czech Republic, the two men handed it over to a local museum The cache weighed more than 15 pounds. Museum of Eastern Bohemia via Facebook Two men were hiking in the Czech Republic when they spotted part of an aluminum can sticking out of the dirt. When they opened it up, they were amazed to find hundreds of shiny gold coins. The men searched the surrounding area and found an iron box full of various treasures made of some sort of yellow metal. Together, the items weigh more than 15 pounds and could be worth as much as $340,000, report Radio Prague International’s Ruth Fraňková and Lörincz Tomáš. The men discovered the items in February while trekking in the foothills of the Krkonoše Mountains, situated near the Polish border in the northern region of the Czech Republic. They handed the cache over to the Museum of East Bohemia, where archaeologists are now analyzing it, according to an April 25 Facebook post. The aluminum can contained nearly 600 gold coins. Museum of Eastern Bohemia via Facebook When Vojtěch Brádle, the museum’s numismatist, first saw the stash, he was impressed. “My jaw dropped,” he tells the Czech news site Novinky.cz, per TVP World. The aluminum can contained 598 total coins, which had been arranged into 11 tidy columns and wrapped in black cloth. The coins originated in many different places, including France, Turkey, Belgium, Romania, Italy and Russia, per Radio Prague International. The coins are stamped with dates ranging from 1808 to 1915. But some also bear small marks “known as countermarkings, [which] indicate that they were reissued in 1921 in an area of Yugoslavia most likely encompassing modern-day Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina,” writes Artnet’s Richard Whiddington. The iron box housed 16 cigarette cases, 10 bracelets, a bag made of wire mesh, a comb, a chain with a key and a powder compact. Researchers aren’t sure what kind of metal those items are made of, but they’re conducting additional tests to determine their composition. The hikers first found the aluminum can, which contained 11 columns of coins wrapped in black fabric. Then they found an iron box full of other treasures. Museum of Eastern Bohemia via Facebook Nobody knows who buried the hoard—or why they had to hide it. Researchers are also puzzled by the fact that whoever buried the cache never came back to retrieve it. Perhaps it belonged to one of the hundreds of thousands of Jews and Czechs who fled to escape persecution after the Nazis annexed the region in the 1930s, the researchers say. Or maybe the Nazis stashed it at the end of the war. Whatever the motivating factors, researchers suspect the items were hidden for the value of the gold. “It was clearly not about the nominal value of the coins,” says Brádle, according to a translation by Radio Prague International. “It’s not about what the coins could buy—that’s not what mattered. It was deliberately hidden because it was precious metal.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.