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Traveling to the gem mines of Brazil will show you some rare finds.

Photos and story by Morgan Beard

Ah, Rio de Janeiro. Blue sky, blue sea, wide beaches, and some of the most beautiful scenery you could ask for. After a summer of distressingly wet weather back at the home office in Pennsylvania, I was looking forward to kick-starting the International Colored Gemstone Association (ICA) Brazilian mine tour in tropical style.

I landed without incident at the international airport. Raining. Figures. But I was greeted with a sunny smile by Luis, the tour guide who would spend the next day or so bumming around Rio with our group while we waited for some stragglers to arrive. "Sorry about the weather," he said as he showed me to the car.

Above: Scenes from the journey -- left: the train station in Rodrigo Silva, right: the Capão stream, from which the Capão imperial topaz mine got its name. Top: The inevitably long and winding road from Galiléa to the Navigator Mine.

After checking into the hotel and a quick shower -- "sorry about the weather," said the apologetic desk clerk -- I met the rest of our group for lunch. We were greeted by our host, Marcelo Bernardes of Brazilian gem wholesale firm Manoel Bernardes, who along with co-organizer Sergio P.F. Martins of Stone World Industria e Comércio Ltda. painstakingly put the tour together. As we ate, a few group members made gentle but pointed comments about a line in our orientation materials that said, "As rain is not anticipated during the entire trip, there is no need to bring raincoats, waterproof garments, or boots." (Note to aspiring tour guides: Never say this.)

Bernardes grinned, a bit embarrassed. "Did I say that?"

It cleared up the next day, and the last of our stragglers -- caught in New York's infamous blackout -- finally arrived. We collected Martins at the local airport and took off for our first destination: Itabira.

Views from the Navigator Mine - looking outside from the inside (left), and a tunnel illuminated by a shaft from the surface (right).

Itabira -- Emerald

Emeralds from the Pitieras Mine.

We landed in Belo Horizonte after a short flight from Rio. Belo is the capital of Minas Gerais, home to 2.2 million people and most of the major gemstone companies in Brazil. It's also a center of manufacturing for Brazil's growing jewelry industry, although the big moneymakers are iron and steel. The area around Belo boasts the largest iron mine in the world, and in the city itself there are gold mines running underneath the well-planned city blocks.

From Belo we were bussed out to Itabira, which -- along with the neighboring Nova Era -- is the richest emerald-producing region in Brazil. Itabira's two main emerald mines, Piteiras and Belmont, together represent the cutting edge of Brazilian mining technology.

Separating the rock ore by size to be sorted inside at the Pitieras plant.

Piteiras is Martins' mine, and he described it with paternal pride. Before digging began, the area was mapped using core drilling to define exactly where the ore body lay. They determined that the best way to reach the emerald was to dig an inclined plane, literally a huge ramp descending into the earth at a steady 14-degree angle. Shooting off from the main plane are "galleries," tunnels blasted into the rock to explore the ore.

"We're trying to determine the relationship between the quartz-elbaite pegmatite vein and the emerald deposit, but we don't know what it is yet," said Martins. The emeralds are found in a biotite schist near where the schist meets a granite gneiss -- typical of all gemstones, it's the contact zone between these two types of rock where, millions of years ago, the elements in the molten lava combined to produce emerald. Piteiras' geologists can use geochemistry to test the rock for the presence of certain elements, which helps tell them where to mine and also which rock to process, thus saving precious time and money.

The tunnels currently run 180 meters down, measured vertically from the surface. Before the deposit is completely mined out, Martins said they expect to reach a depth of 500 meters. If they find a particularly rich area, they'll mine that while continuing to extend the plane downward to explore for more veins, thus ensuring a much more consistent production.

Sorting ore to find emerald at the Pitieras Mine.

When all is said and done, they wash about 2,000 tons of ore per month, from which they recover an average of eight kilograms of emerald rough. Of that, about 10 percent will be facetable, and only 10 percent of the facetable material will be good-quality.

Emerald rough as it appears when pulled off the sorting belt at the Belmont Mine.

Once mined, the rocks are crushed and sorted by machine into various sizes; then the emerald is picked out by hand on moving conveyor belts. The result is some of the most beautiful emerald Brazil has to offer, and some of the steadiest production. It's a far cry from the mines operated by garimpeiros (independent miners) in Nova Era, where about 300 different mine owners have claims over an area two to three kilometers (1.2 to 1.8 miles) square, and strikes are hit or miss. When miners there find emerald, they work that vein until it's completely mined out, then look for more.

Trenches prevent the emerald in the loose soil from washing away at the Belmont mine.

Moving northwest along the same geological formation as Nova Era and Piteiras is the Belmont Mine. Originally a farm -- and still operating with approximately 100 cows -- they've been mining for emerald since 1978. About 70 percent of the gems they're currently finding come from the loose dirt of a nearby hillside. They use heavy machinery to systematically strip about 1,500 tons of dirt per month off the side of the hill, digging trenches to keep the rain from washing their emeralds into the nearby stream.

About five years ago, they calculated that the ore body on the hill runs diagonally downward and underground, so they began underground operations. Like Piteiras, they've been doing some drilling to try to locate the best place to mine. They're also exploring through a system of tunnels running off a 75-meter shaft sunk vertically into the earth. They estimate that they have 10 years of production left in the open pits of the hillside versus 30 years underground. The plan is to make sure the underground operations are up to speed and producing regularly by the time the hillside is mined out.

The dirt from the hillside is collected to be washed and sorted at the Belmont mine.

Like Piteiras, they mine exclusively by blasting -- the rock is too hard, and the emerald too scarce, to make it economical to mine by hand. From the main shaft they have tunnels, or "levels," going horizontally along the ore body and "sub-levels" that go upward from the main tunnels. "You always go up," Bernardes explained. "That way gravity does the work," carrying the debris from the blast down to the tunnel floor where it can be shoveled into a wheelbarrow and hauled up to the surface. At Piteiras, they drive trucks into the mine to haul the ore to the processing plant. The tiny platform that carries miners up and down Belmont's entrance shaft will only hold five people or a small load of rock at a time, which makes for slower going.

Dealers inspect a rare 85 carat emerald find from the Belmont Mine.

The manager of the Belmont Mine shows off his rough.

Once the rock gets to the processing plant, however, the process is identical, down to the sorters picking emerald off a conveyor belt. The mine produces about 10 kilos of emerald per month, of which about 20 percent is good quality. Just two weeks before our arrival, they found a piece of rough weighing 85 carats of top color. After a bit of conferring, the dealers on the tour agreed that the crystal could produce cut stones of a total of 28 carats. That's a rare find, though -- for any emerald mine.

Church at Ouro Preto.

Fittingly, the region is also home to one of Brazil's most beautiful gemstones, imperial topaz. Yellow topaz is hardly unique to Brazil, but only this region seems to produce the sunset orange-pinks and peaches that you find here.

Bulldozing the alluvial soil at the Capão mine.

Sergio Martins (left) and Werner Colombarolli (right) inspecting topaz at the Capão mine.

The center of the action is a 20-square-kilometer (8-square-mile) area just outside of Ouro Preto. Most of that region -- the parts that are being mined, that is -- are worked by garimpeiros. We ran into a couple on the side of the road, shoveling along in a pit perhaps 6 meters (20 feet) wide by 3 meters (10 feet) deep. The land, a small, neglected margin between the road and some local farms, technically belongs to the local government, but nobody seems to have the heart to shut them down. Operations like this one generally only produce a few crystals a week, enough for the miners to survive and feed their families.

Left: a typical garimpeiro mine near the Capão imperial topaz mine. Right: A garimpeiro demonstrates how they wash the gravel looking for topaz.

When they're ready to sell, they have a ready buyer in Werner Colombarolli of Topázio Imperial Ltda., who runs the largest imperial topaz mine in the region, the Capão Mine.

Colombarolli's operation is by far the most advanced in the area. It only produces about 30 percent of the topaz produced in the region, but he buys another 40 to 50 percent from the garimpeiros, making him the man to see if you want the good stuff.

A 27-gram imperial topaz crystal from the Capão Mine - a find to make the dealer drool.

The Capão Mine has been in operation for 32 years, with pits opened and then covered over as they're mined out. The current pit looks more like a sunken football stadium than the tiny pits that the garimpeiros dig out. A bulldozer at the bottom of the pit pushes loose soil to one of three "drag scrapers," huge metal scoops that are hauled by a mechanized pulley system to the top of the pit. There, the dirt is washed away using high-power water jets, and then a jig sorts the remaining rocks by size and feeds the smaller pieces onto a sorting belt.

At Capã they wash about 400 tons of dirt a day, or 8,000 tons a month, which yields about 30 kilograms of topaz. The problem is that imperial topaz tends to be very included; you need to look down the crystal lengthwise to see if there's any facetable material at the core. The yield of facet-grade material is only about 2 percent of the rough production, and not all of that is good color.

The good news is that production remains steady, and Colombarolli expects the pit to keep producing for another 10 years. And there's much more area left to explore on their 800-hectare (2,000-acre) claim.

The streets of the tiny town, Rodrigo Silva.

Back at his office in the tiny town of Rodrigo Silva, which exists solely to support the Capão Mine, Colombarolli showed off some of his prize rough. One piece in particular, discovered just this year, is a flawless 27-gram crystal of a pink that only occurs in most dealers' dreams. Colombarolli won't discuss price, but the dealers in the room speculated that it would sell for between $60,000 and $80,000.

Governador Valadares -- Tourmaline and Aquamarine

Workers at the Gypsy Mine.

In the dim light, a flashlight reveals the dendritic inclusions of this piece of quartz from the Navigator Mine.

The landscape changes as you leave the lush forests of Ouro Preto and Itabira for the more remote Governador Valadares. The landscape gets harsher, and the living gets harder, too. Ironically, this rich gem-producing area is one of the poorest in Brazil. The economy depends almost entirely on cattle ranching and mining for industrial materials like feldspar, mica, and clay, and there's hardly a hill to be seen that hasn't been cleared for one purpose or another.

Leaving the city behind, we plunged into a world of tall grass, cows, and the more-than-occasional vulture.

A miner picks away inside the Navigator Mine.

We were on our way to the village of Galiléia to visit Rogério Zucoloto Luz, a newcomer to the gemstone world. He originally started working the Navigator Mine for mica, starting with a pick and shovel and then moving in some heavy equipment to really open up the hillside. Most of what the mine produces is white quartz and feldspar, but along the way he started to find pockets of aquamarine and green tourmaline.

Luz is the new face of gem mining in Brazil. The government has introduced new environmental rules that make legal mining more difficult and expensive, and even the illegal miners have trouble making ends meet. Back in the 1970s, local businessmen in this area would often fund a gem mine on the side, gambling a few thousand reais a month that the mine would produce. Now, money is tight, and it's up to the miners to fund their own ventures. More and more, it's people like Luz, who can produce a steady income by mining other minerals in the same place, who are producing the most gems.

A "pocket" - now mined out - at the Gypsy Mine.

In the Navigator Mine, Luz recovers about 1,000 tons of feldspar per month. He found his first pocket of tourmaline in 2000, and once he realized how much more he could get from selling gems he got a lot more careful about opening up gem pockets. But most of his profits still come from other minerals.

On the day we arrived, he was just about to open up a pocket with tourmaline inside. He uses controlled blasting to remove the surrounding rock, hauling the ore out on trucks. The smell of dynamite hung heavy in the air. He had been trying to open the pocket for our arrival -- something that few non-miners ever get to see -- but broken equipment had put him behind schedule. We had to settle for peering into the small opening that exposed the edge of the pocket, reaching through to touch the tourmaline sitting patiently in its matrix.

In the pit of the Gypsy Mine, miners pause in their daily work as tour members inspect veins of aquamarine.

We had lunch at Luz's home where, with typical Brazilian hospitality, he and his family prepared a churrasco, a Brazilian barbecue. We were the first group of foreigners ever to visit his mines, and he was proud and happy to show off everything he'd done.

In the afternoon, we visited the Gypsy Mine, another of Luz's three operations. This one was primarily an albite mine, but also produced copious quantities of aquamarine. Deep in the pit, he showed us a 50-kilogram sack of aquamarine that he'd gotten from the vein running along one wall. "How long did it take you to get this?" I asked him. The answer, via translator, was that it came from the afternoon blasting.

The down side is that most of the aquamarine was of low quality, cabochon or bead material that will sell for pennies per carat. The up side? A hundred kilos a day will get you a lot of pennies.

Score! This 50kg sack of aquamarine came from the vein along one wall of the Gypsy Mine.

Teofilo Otoni -- Chrysoberyl

Tour members join the fun as miners search the newly-washed gravel for chrysoberyl at the Faisca Mine.

Teofilo Otoni is the beating heart of Brazil's colored gem trade, the town where production from hundreds of small mines dotting the region comes to be bought and sold. Driving through the region, it's common to see tunnels cut into the hillsides -- or, more correctly, the telltale white of the waste rock dumped outside the mine. These are all garimpeiro operations, some literally located in people's backyards.

We were on our way to visit one of the world's most famous chrysoberyl deposits, spread throughout the 1,800 hectares (4,500 acres) of the Faísca and Crisolita Basins.

The hills around the Faísca mine have untapped potential to produce chrysoberyl.

Brazil's environmental agency, the Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (IBAMA), has been cracking down on miners in every corner of the country, but perhaps no one has felt it more than Duarte & Bastos, the Brazilian company that has legal rights to the deposit. At its height, Faísca Mining Ltd. -- the company that mined the deposit until Duarte & Bastos acquired it in 1993 -- employed about 1,200 miners. Four or five years ago, IBAMA shut down the mine for polluting the local stream and deforesting the region, which can cause serious erosion problems. Now, with only a dozen or so miners left, they're allowed to mine on a limited basis while they implement a 20-year plan to replenish the vegetation and build dams to remove soil sediment from the water.

The deposit is entirely alluvial, meaning that the rock containing the gemstone vein was eroded and washed into a nearby stream, where it mixed into the other river stones. That happened so many millions of years ago that the gravel containing the chrysoberyl can be found stretching up the local hillsides. At the moment, however, miners are following the path of the gravel along a local streambed, rinsing the mud right on the spot and pulling the occasional topaz crystal out along with the yellow-green chrysoberyl.

The owner of the Faísca Mine inspects a 50-gr. piece of chrysoberyl.

Chrysoberyl is the reverse of imperial topaz -- any fractured or included areas of the rough were long since tumbled away by the force of flowing water, so the pebble-like crystals tend to be clean. The most desirable material is the rough that will cut cat's-eyes, which are especially prized in Asia. The cat's-eye chrysoberyl is about 30 percent of the rough found, although only 10 percent of that is good color.

As we watched, a sharp-eyed miner pulled a 50-gram piece out of the newly-washed gravel. The dealers present figured it would cut about 30 carats of facet-grade chrysoberyl, perhaps a few weak cat's-eyes, but in its rough form the pieces would sell for only a couple hundred dollars.

São José da Batalha -- Paraíba Tourmaline

A view of the tunnels inside the Paraíba mines.

If the region around Governador Valadares and Teofilo Otoni is harsh, it pales in comparison to the state of Paraíba. "It's not usually this green," explained Bernardes, waving a hand at the patches of scrub brush growing near the road. "Sometimes in this region they can go for four years without significant rainfall."

Paraíba is a desert, no question, despite the unusually heavy rains they'd had in the weeks before we arrived. The state is so poor that they grow fields of palma cactus as food and water for the cattle -- and, in very bad times, food for themselves. The main form of income is government subsidy; there are no local industries to give people work.

The famed Paraíba tourmaline deposit lies at the end of a long dirt road, just outside of the tiny village of São José da Batalha. We'd been traveling all day, and it was nearly dark by the time we arrived, but we were all excited to see the source of this almost legendary gem.

The deposit is split into two sections. The source of the original material that came onto the market is the Batalha Mine, located on the top of the Morro Alto hill. That mine consists mainly of shafts sunk deep into the hill, following six "lines," or tourmaline-bearing pegmatites, as they meander and curve their way through the soft soil, dazzling white from the presence of kaolin clay. The kaolin itself is a valuable industrial material, but the miners here are after bigger game.

A narrow shaft descends to a lower level of the de Souza Paraíba tourmaline mine.

The top of the hill, part of its side, and a large section of the ground below belong to Heitor Barbosa, the man who introduced Paraíba tourmaline to the world. Barbosa had been working the area for seven years before hitting the jackpot with this neon blue and green tourmaline in 1988, and it's been a hard road for him. After only two years of full production, in 1990 and 1991, local politics and ownership disputes brought mining to a complete halt. Although today Barbosa controls about 80 percent of the deposit area, you can feel the memories of bad blood hanging in the air, and see its legacy in the huge wall Barbosa built to encircle his part of the property.

Below the hill, in the other part of the deposit, an ancient riverbed holds the tourmaline weathered from the hillside veins and also waste rock from the original mining. That area, currently operated by João Henrique de Souza and Ednacé Silvestre Henrique under contract with T.O.E. Míeraçâo, is the one that's producing most of the new Paraíba tourmaline on the market.

When you say "most of the production," that needs some qualification. Unlike other mines, which can measure their production in kilograms per month, at the de Souza area they wash approximately 4,000 tons of dirt per month, which gets them about 40 grams of tourmaline -- of which 10 grams might be good-quality.

De Souza works the alluvial material to pay the bills, but he's pinning his hopes for the future on his own underground tunnels to the east and west of the hill. He has a maze of shafts and chambers stretching deep into the hillside, following the lines with neatly-cut square tunnels. The soft kaolin crumbled ominously around us as we brushed the sides of the tunnels, carefully avoiding the downward shafts blocked off with police tape and construction barricades. In an effort to track the erratic pegmatite veins, de Souza has started core drilling, but it's tough going. The dike can narrow to just an inch or so in some places or abruptly change direction, and even when you can follow it there are no guarantees that it will produce. But the demand for true Paraíba tourmaline is so intense -- and the prices so high -- that even a little bit can go a long way in keeping the mine open.

The visit to the Paraíba mine, and all the mines on the tour, offered a rare insight into what it takes to bring gems to market. Being able to take the tour with other members of the industry, particularly the dealers, made the insight even deeper. Watching them cast a cynical eye on a piece of rough and calculate its value to the dollar, or, more rarely, go gaga over an extraordinary crystal, brought home both the skill and the passion that go into all levels of the gem trade. It reminds us of what it's too easy to forget when you're surrounded by gemstones all day: These little beauties are an expression of pure rarity.