The Muzo emerald museum: inside the world capital

The title the town gives itself is not undeserved. The mines that surround it have produced for five centuries the emeralds considered the finest in the world, with the warm, deep green sought by 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 become one of the quietest towns in Colombia, 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 is the fruit of years of research and collecting carried out by local enthusiasts, concerned with preserving the material memory of the stone and of the region.

The collection holds nearly 480 pre-Hispanic pieces: rough emeralds, fossils, archaeological objects, pottery, but also old photographs and historical documents. It is a modest museum in size, but of rare density: each display case condenses centuries of mining and cultural history.

Unlike the museum of the same name in Bogotá, housed on the 23^rd floor of the Avianca building, the Muzo museum has a particular force: it 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. It is this particular process, different from that of African emeralds, that gives Muzo stones their unique warm color.

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 go back to the source, to the moment when the stone is still only a green promise in the rock.

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 bear witness to a civilization for which the emerald was not a commodity but a sacred material.

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 carefully cut 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 tales of the odyssey that the discovery of each stone has been.

The cutting machine, for its part, is a reminder that the worth of an emerald does not rest on its nature alone: a careful cut reveals the color and maximizes the light. It is an art in itself, handed down locally from generation to generation.

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 locally 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 an emblematic 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 1993, he helped bring an end to a conflict that had left thousands 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, is today one of the safest in Colombia and can be visited without concern.

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 an incomparable immersion in the world's cradle of the stone.