One protester told AFP they had acted after the authorities failed to act on their complaints that the activity was damaging their farms and ruining the local environment.

Several women and a village leader were arrested following the protest at Nhiquin, near the resort town of Valera not far from the border with Senegal, witnesses told AFP.

They said several hundred women were involved in the protest at the site, which Chinese companies have been working since 2022.

"All the facilities have been burned down," Interior Minister Botche Cande told reporters after visiting the site, without specifying what exactly had been destroyed.

"When the state makes an effort to find partners, nobody has the right to destroy their property," he added, visibly irritated.

Cande said he would be sending more guards to the site to guarantee its security while it was rebuilt.

The women responsible had all fled and taken shelter in the forest, he added. "They must be tracked down and arrested."

"It's unacceptable that people do such things and everything goes on as if nothing happened," he said.

- Rice fields 'destroyed' -

Edmundo Infanda, sub-prefect of Suzana, which takes in Nhiquin, said a lot of women had taken part in the protest and the local police could not stop their demonstration.

One of the women who took part in the protest, Aissato Cadjaf, told AFP: "We told them we didn't want sand extracted without our consent.

"All our rice fields are destroyed. There are no more fish in the small river near the site," she added. But no one had listened, despite their protests, she said.

Zircon is used in ceramics and the building industry.

Guinea-Bissau is ranked 179th out of 193 on the UN's Human Development Index.

About a quarter of its citizens were living on less than $1.90 a day, according to the World Bank's latest figures.

The poverty and political instability have made the west African country a target for drug traffickers, who use it as a transit territory to move cocaine from Latin America to Europe.