The Muzo emerald museum: a visit inside

The title the town gives itself is not undeserved. The mines that surround it have produced emeralds for five centuries, and their deep, slightly warm green is a reference for collectors and the great jewelry houses.

Before the arrival of the Spanish in the 16^th century, the territory was inhabited by the Muzo people, who were already working the open-pit deposits. The conquistadors, drawn by tales of abundance, finally seized the mines in 1564. Extraction has never stopped since.

The region has also known dark decades: the "green war", a territorial conflict over control of the mines, left several thousand dead between the 1960s and the 1990s. Today, Muzo has found calm again and is betting on emerald tourism. On the mountains overlooking the town, a giant inscription can be read: "Paz, Dios ve todo", "Peace, God sees everything", put there by a wealthy miner, worn out by the years of bloodshed.

The International Emerald Museum of Muzo sits on the town's central square, facing the parish church of the Santísima Trinidad de los Muzos. It grew out of years of research and collecting by people from the region, keen to keep the physical traces of the stone and its history.

The collection holds nearly 480 pre-Hispanic pieces, pottery and archaeological objects, alongside rough emeralds, fossils, old photographs and historical documents. The museum is small, but its display cases are full: minerals, objects and documents from several centuries sit side by side.

Unlike the museum of the same name in Bogotá, housed on the 23^rd floor of the Avianca building, the Muzo museum stands on the very site of extraction. The pieces it exhibits come from the ground around the building.

The centerpiece of any emerald museum is the rough crystals in their original rock. At Muzo, you see them as they come out of the mountain: hexagonal green prisms still held in their gangue of white calcite and black shale.

This contrast is the geological signature of the deposit. Colombian emeralds form in hydrothermal veins, when fluids rich in chromium and vanadium circulate through sedimentary rocks. This process, different from that of African emeralds, and the low iron content of these fluids explain the clean green of Muzo stones.

Seeing these rough blocks changes the way you look at a cut stone. A jewelry emerald is the outcome of long work of extraction, sorting, cutting and polishing. Here, you see it before all that work, still held in its rock.

Some of these rough crystals already show the six-ray wheel of trapiche emeralds.

The pottery is among the most moving pieces in the museum. These terracotta vasijas were shaped by the peoples who lived in the region long before the Spanish arrived. They are a reminder that, for these peoples, the emerald also had a ritual value.

For this pottery sometimes had an unexpected function. Throughout the Andean zone, pre-Columbian cultures buried vessels filled with offerings, gold, emeralds, ritual objects, as gifts to the gods or the ancestors. Archaeologists have unearthed, in the region, vasijas containing worked emeralds, laid as offerings in temples or graves.

The museum also displays other remains of ancient daily life, stone axes, fossils and broken objects dug out of the soil of Boyacá.

Part of the museum is devoted to know-how: how, in Muzo, rough stone was turned into gem for generations, and how it was weighed, assessed and traded.

The scales deserve particular attention. On the square in Muzo, on Sunday, the busiest trading day, dealers and buyers gather around tables set up for business. There, two instruments are never missing: the loupe and the quilatera, the carat scale. They accompany the conversations, and the story each seller tells about his stone.

The cutting machine, for its part, is a reminder that the beauty of an emerald does not rest on the rough alone: a careful cut opens up the color and sends the light back. That is the craft of Christian, the lapidary we work with between Muzo and Bogotá.

The emerald never comes alone. The subsoil of Muzo holds other minerals, often spectacular, which the museum shows off in several display cases.

Quartz often accompanies emerald in the veins of Muzo. There is also calcite, pyrite, known as "fool's gold" because its golden color has deceived many a buyer over the centuries, and various concretions. These minerals, without the market value of emerald, tell of the complex geology that made this land so rich.

You cannot speak of Muzo without speaking of Víctor Carranza. His face is everywhere in the town, on the walls, in the shops, and right into the museum, where his portrait occupies a place of honor. Nicknamed "the emerald tsar", he dominated the industry for half a century.

Born in 1935 into a peasant family in Boyacá, Carranza began looking for emeralds as a child. At his death, in 2013, he controlled close to 40 % of national production. The museum keeps a singular object: the two-way radio he used to run his mines and his network.

Carranza is a complex figure. For many in Muzo, he is the man who brought peace to a region ravaged by the "green war": in 1990, he was one of the signatories of the peace that ended a conflict with several thousand dead. But his name also remains attached to numerous controversies and accusations that marked the violent history of the region. The museum presents him above all as the central figure he was for the Colombian emerald, without whom the modern history of Muzo cannot be understood.

The museum stands on the central square of Muzo, easy to spot facing the church. Muzo is reached from Bogotá in around six hours by road, generally via Chiquinquirá. The town, long reputed to be dangerous, has found calm again and can be visited today.

A visit to the museum often forms part of a wider route: the Emerald Tour, which also takes in a mine, the "Paz, Dios ve todo" viewpoint, and the village square where stones are traded on Sundays. For anyone interested in emeralds, it is a day spent where the stone comes out of the ground.

To place Muzo in the geology of the country, read the page on the emerald mines of Colombia. For the village itself, its Sunday market and its dealers, our journal Muzo, emerald capital of the world tells what you see there.