Whilst gold attracts all the attention, the process plant at the Martabe Mine located in North Sumatra, Indonesia had several other issues to accommodate in design, that is, to account for high silver grades, to manage significant copper in the ore, and to control variable mercury levels. Notwithstanding those metallurgical constraints, the challenging site conditions including mountainous terrain, earthquake-prone region, heavy tropical rainfall, containment of acid rock drainage water and poor geotechnical conditions created significant earthworks, water management and materials handling challenges for the project. The Martabe Mine is located in the District of Batang Toru in the Province of North Sumatra near to the coastal town of Sibolga. The Martabe Project is in a geologically complex zone. Ore will initially be mined from the Purnama deposit by open cut mining. This pit provides an average grade to the process plant of 1.9 g/t Au and 25 g/t Ag with grades as high as 3.0 g/t Au and 36 g/t Ag expected. The process plant is designed to treat 4.5 million tonnes per year of gold/silver ore. This paper describes not only the metallurgical issues but also the physical and operability challenges of the Martabe Project process plant design.CITATION:Sherrit, R, Levings, H, McLean, E and Hoey, M, 2013. Martabe overcomes the challenges, in Proceedings MetPlant 2013 , pp 479-501 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).