Andean Scapes team · Updated
Emilia and her sister: the Gachalá emeralds
The same day Emilia came out of a Gachalá mine, a second, purer stone appeared under a collapsing bank of earth. It left the mine wrapped in a cape. This is what the record says, and where it stops.
The short answer
Emilia is an emerald of about 7,000 carats found in 1969 at the Las Cruces mine in Gachalá. On the same day, according to the mine owner, a worker found a second, purer stone and took it out of the mine hidden in a cape.[1]
Our main source is a 1996 El Tiempo article built on the memories of the mine owner and the son of the man who negotiated Emilia’s sale.[1] Spanish Wikipedia tells a partly different version.[2]
Emilia
Emilia weighed 7,025 carats, almost three pounds. The day after the find it passed into the custody of the Banco de la República.[1]
Spanish Wikipedia gives 7,015 carats, the date 15 July 1969, a sale in Bogotá for 20 million pesos and a home at the Museo del Oro.[2] The owner, who said he was paid 30,000 pesos for his share, remembered it later turning up behind glass in a Swiss museum.[1]
The sister
The same day, a worker named Tito Daza turned the washing hose on the spot where Emilia had come out. A bank of earth collapsed, green flashes appeared in the mud, and he washed the stone and wrapped it in a cape.[1]
He told no one at the mine, said he had a stomachache and left, holding the stone against his belly. The owner kept it three months on his bedside table. He described it as about 12 centimeters across, around 50 long, 8.5 pounds, wedge-shaped, and purer than Emilia.[1]
The sale
Months later it was sold in the owner’s house for 5 million pesos. Some time after, the buyer showed them an English-language magazine saying it had been sold in the United States for 87 million pesos.[1]
The owner went to the United States and contacted Interpol; Daza spent two months in prison before the complaint was withdrawn. By 1996 Daza was the owner’s son-in-law.[1]
La Tito, La Indiecita and other names
The record does not agree on the second stone’s date, weight or name.[2]
Spanish Wikipedia describes an 8,000-carat stone found by Tito Daza three years after Emilia, at the same place, known in Gachalá as “La Tito” and taken secretly to Switzerland.[2] The regional memory we recorded for Fuego Verde calls Emilia’s sister La Indiecita and says it left under a ruana; the 1996 account says a cape and gives no name.[1]
Tito Daza of Gachalá is not Justo Daza, the Chivor miner linked to the Patricia emerald in 1921.[1]
A curse with a woman’s name
El Tiempo titled its story “a curse with a woman’s name”. In the words of the article, finding an emerald is like winning the lottery and losing it at the same time.[1]
For the people who found them, these stones were rarely the fortune they promised. In 1996 the owner lived in Gachetá and told the story from a bench in the main square.[1]