Mining is the Free State’s major employer.

A gold reef over 400 kilometers long, known as the goldfields region, stretches across Gauteng and the Free State. South Africa is the world's largest gold producer. The country's largest gold-mining complex is Free State Consolidated Goldfields, with an area of 330 square kilometers.

The province has 12 gold mines, producing 30% of South Africa's output and making it the fifth-largest producer of gold in the world. The Harmony Gold Refinery and Rand Refinery are the only two gold refineries in South Africa.

Lejweleputswa (formally Goldfields), meaning greystone, refers to the unprocessed gold-bearing rock for which the area is famous. In April 1938, a borehole sunk in search for water on the farm St Helena struck lava, not subterranean water. The lava was of a deep-flowing source of gold ore linked to the famous Witwatersrand.

Suddenly the talk was not of the Reef but of the 'Golden Triangle', and suddenly the Free State was to share in the riches and the brotherhood of geological wealth. The world descended on the Free State almost overnight. Farmlands and their humble inhabitants found themselves part of a gold rush unprecedented in such fervor for half a century.

Foreigners and their mines came, people from the rest of the Free State, more prospectors from South Africa, fortune-seekers from the world. Industries sprang up like strange flowers on the silent earth, their workforce establishing one of South Africa's most advanced infrastructures and producing gold annually at a rate that today represented one third of all that produced internationally.

A million people find their home in Lejweleputswa, with Welkom's residents enjoying a high per capita income, and the descendants of the churchgoers, the foreigners, the prospectors and indeed even the animals, flourish on a sun-drenched land.