Andean Scapes team · Updated
Patricia: 632 carats from Chivor
A miner opened the pocket, the manager reached in up to his elbow, and a six-sided crystal came out into a jacket pocket. The stone went to New York. The miner, the story goes, got ten dollars.
The stone
Patricia is a doubly terminated hexagonal emerald crystal of 632 carats from the Chivor mine, now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.[1]
Spanish Wikipedia gives its size as 8 centimeters tall and 5.5 centimeters across.[2]
How it came out
A mine worker named Justo Daza uncovered what looked like a productive vein and pocket at Chivor.[1]
The manager recalled reaching into the vein “up to his elbow”, first pulling out small albite, apatite and quartz crystals, then closing his hand on something large and pocketing it without looking. “If what is in my pocket is an emerald, I will have fulfilled my contract,” he told a colleague.[1]
1920 or 1921?
GIA, citing the 1925 account of the mine manager, dates the find to January 1921.[1]
Spanish Wikipedia’s article on Chivor says 1920[2], and Semana, in 1992, wrote December 1920.[3] We follow GIA, which cites the account of the manager who was there, and show the other dates because readers will meet them.
The ten dollars
Justo Daza is said to have received about ten dollars.[1]
Semana told it differently in 1992: the stone was bought from its owner for 10 dollars and sold abroad for 60,000 dollars of the time.[3]
Where it is
Patricia is in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.[1]
Spanish Wikipedia credits the mine’s legal manager of the time with donating it.[2] The museum’s own website blocks automated reading, so we have not checked that against its record yet.