Ilakaka sapphire

In the early 1990s about forty people lived here. By 2005 there were close to sixty thousand.

Ilakaka sits in the Ihorombe Region of south-western Madagascar, in Ihosy District, 735 km south of Antananarivo and near Isalo National Park. It lies on Route Nationale 7 between Toliara, 210 km away, and Fianarantsoa at 307 km, with Ranohira 26 km off and Sakaraha 84 km.

What changed everything was 1998. One of the largest known alluvial sapphire deposits on Earth was found in the valley of the Ilakaka river, and a quiet rural village turned into a boom town almost overnight. The BBC's Jonny Hogg, reporting from Madagascar in 2007, described a collection of huts that had been little more than a truck stop growing into a thriving mining town, and noted that Ilakaka and the region around it now account for around half of the world's sapphires. Everyone there, he wrote, is an outsider.

The scramble reshaped the country as well as the town. People arrived by the hundred from across the region, bringing their own food and habits with them, and the sapphire fever spread well beyond Ilakaka itself. Hogg describes children he assumed were swimming in the river coming back out with handfuls of sapphires.

Be clear-eyed about the risk. With profits this large, violence is common, and the BBC reported the town's reputation as one of the most dangerous places in Madagascar, in a country where civilians carrying guns is otherwise an unusual sight. This is not a place to turn up and start digging.

Sapphires from here are alluvial, which means they have been weathered out of their parent rock and moved by water into gravels, and that is why they can be recovered from pits and riverbeds rather than hard-rock mines. Buy Malagasy sapphire through the trade, and ask about origin.