Episode 3. Coscuez: Cielo Abierto, the mine and Plaza del Chácaro

Mud, liquor and green stones

Field notes: what we saw in the region

From the outside, Occidente looks like mud, liquor and people fighting over green stones. That is what we thought too, until Coscuez. The problem was not the place. It was everything we did not know how to look at.

Arriving

Field notes: what we saw in the region

Coscuez makes little effort to look modern. Dirt road, mud, motorbikes, old jeeps, zinc shacks. Nothing that says premium destination.

Cielo Abierto

Field notes: what we saw in the region

Above the settlement is Cielo Abierto, a viewpoint from which all of Occidente seems to open at once: Las Quinchas, Quípama, Muzo, Pauna, one mountain behind another.

Coscuez itself is one of the named hills of San Pablo de Borbur, alongside Peñas Blancas.^[2]

Territorio Vásquez

Territorio Vásquez is not a tourism brand. Between 1863 and 1883 it was vacant public land of the Republic of Colombia, a baldío, covering today’s Puerto Boyacá, Otanche and Borbur.^[1]

It was named after Cayetano Vásquez, a martyr of the independence. It was created mainly to build the western road and found settlements along it, and it was disputed in the nineteenth century between the states of Cundinamarca and Boyacá.^[1]

Down in the mine

Field notes: what we saw in the region

Below, the story changes: tunnels, mud, noise, hands. People going into the mountain waiting for the vein to finally show color. Coscuez is one of the five mining districts of the western belt.^[3]

An emerald does not start in a jewelry shop. It starts here, in work, patience and darkness.

Plaza del Chácaro

Field notes: what we saw in the region

Close by is the Plaza del Chácaro: an earth floor, stalls, motorbikes, guaqueros, buyers, miners still black from the tunnel, and stones passing from hand to hand. Some people look at an emerald for five seconds and know far more than we did after half an hour. They see quality, color, crystal. We saw green.

Independent searching, guaquería, has existed in the emerald towns of western Boyacá for more than seventy years.^[4]

Cards, cacho and gallina borracha

Field notes: what we saw in the region

Coscuez does not end at the mine. There is the music, the cacho and the naipe, tomata, the jeeps, the conversations. And the food: arroz de fines, gallina Nicaragua, gallina borracha.

That is not backwardness

Field notes: what we saw in the region

You can build an old hotel, buy a jeep, put on popular music and hang photos of emeralds. You cannot manufacture Coscuez. Here the mine, the food, the games, the roads, the stories and the people grew up together. That is not backwardness. It is identity.

After seeing where these stones come from, one question was left: what has to happen for an emerald to stop being a stone and end up with a name of its own? That is the next episode.