Picture: A fake gold bar as I was not allowed to take pictures inside the safe. For obvious reasons...
I am sure you have seen a Hollywood movie where thieves broke into an elaborately guarded high-security safe? Then you would also have seen fancy technology being employed to safeguard the valuables in the safe, right? It is much less dramatic in real-life. I know because I recently toured the biggest safe on mainland Europe operated by UBS bank in Zurich. The massive vault holds up to 2’500 tons of gold, silver, platinum and rhodium on palettes. The safe is rather unspectacular with two enormous safety doors and ample video-surveillance located beneath an office building. Inside it looks rather like a normal storage area with palettes with precious metals stacked to the ceiling. A palette of gold for example weighs one ton and a gold bar is worth 250’000 Swiss Francs. When they first loaded the safe the floor dropped one centimeter! To my disappointment most gold bars were unpolished and therefore did not shine. The inside of the safe was in general very industrial and not fancy at all. Nevertheless I was able to hold 1.5mio. Swiss Francs worth of Rhodium in a tin-can.
PS: A curiosity was the fist-sized platinum blocks with the stamp of the USSR on it. The Soviet Union and now Russia are the biggest platinum producer in the world.
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