Colombian emerald (Muzo)

In July 1915 a curator from the US National Museum spent six days at these mines and wrote down exactly what he found.

Muzo is a town and municipality in Western Boyaca, Colombia, 178 km from the departmental capital at Tunja, its centre sitting at 815 metres above sea level. It is widely called the world capital of emeralds, because the mines around it hold the highest quality stones of their kind anywhere.

People were taking emeralds out of this ground long before Europeans arrived. The Muzo, a Cariban-speaking people who settled the area around 1000 AD, worked the stones out of the rock using poles of hard tropical wood and water, and were known as the Emerald People. The formation that carries the gems is named after them. When the Spanish came looking, the first conquistador into Muzo territory was Luis Lanchero in 1539, a soldier of Nikolaus Federmann's expedition, and he met fierce resistance and had to fall back to Bogota.

That 1915 visit is worth reading. Joseph E. Pogue, assistant curator in the Division of Mineralogy and Petrology at the US National Museum, published his account in the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers in 1917. He places the deposits in the western foothills of the eastern branch of the Colombian Andes, about 96 km northwest of Bogota in a direct line and about 8 km by trail west of the village itself, as eight great open cuts grouped closely in the steep-walled valley of the Itoco, a stream feeding the Rio Minero and then the Magdalena.

Getting there was the hard part, and his description of it is blunt. Although the mines lie only 33 km from La Dorada at the head of steam navigation on the lower Magdalena, they could not practicably be reached from there at all. The route was rail from Bogota to Zipaquira or Nemocon, then two and a half days by mule over a trail he called execrable. Modern roads have changed the journey. The mines are commercial operations, so arrange access rather than arriving with a shovel.