Pala pegmatite district

A Chinese empress created the market for pink tourmaline, and this is where it came from.

Pala is a small, mostly Native American community inside the Pala Indian Reservation in San Diego County, California, with 1,490 people at the 2020 census. It was a traditional gathering place for Native peoples for centuries before Mission San Antonio de Pala was established here as a sub-mission in the early 19th century. The name may come from the Cupeno or Luiseno word pale, meaning water, or from the Spanish pala, a shovel.

After the United States annexed California, the district became known for its minerals, gold and tourmaline among them. Numerous gem mines were established in the 1890s, and the Pala district still produces tourmaline, with the pink variety as the regional specialty. The US Geological Survey records the Stewart Pegmatite here as a producer of niobium, tantalum and lithium, listing lepidolite and microlite as its ores.

The pink boom has a specific cause. The Empress Dowager Cixi, who lived from 1860 to 1908, was said to prize Pala's pink tourmaline for carving into buttons and other accessories, and the demand that followed ran from about 1901 to 1911. Fred Rynerson, a local miner and gem cutter, recorded that the San Diego Tourmaline Mining Company's best years were 1903 to 1910, and that the China trade wanted pink cabochon material specifically rather than the clearer stone a cutter would facet.

Something else came out of these workings. Morganite, the rose-coloured beryl, was named by George F. Kunz at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in December 1910, and its first discovery has been attributed both to Pala and to Madagascar.

This is reservation land and the mines are worked commercially. Arrange access, do not assume it.