Answer: South Africa

It’s pretty incredible to think that nearly 50 percent of all the gold extracted by humans over time has come from a single country. What’s even more incredible than knowing that nearly half of it all came from a single country is that it all came from a single region within that single country.

Thanks to a very curious geographic and astronomical history that combines hydro-thermal activity and meteor impacts, the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa is the most gold rich location on Earth. Since the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand region in 1886, over 50,000 tons of gold have been extracted from the region.

The equivalent of 11 billion dollars worth of gold, adjusted for inflation, was mined from the region just in the initial year the gold deposits were seriously worked and, by 1910 miners were extracting nearly 20 billion dollars worth of gold a year from the Witwatersrand region. To date it remains the most extensive gold field ever found and mining companies are still actively extracting gold and companion minerals from the Basin.