The legend of Fura and Tena, and its versions

The short answer

Fura and Tena are two hills above the Minero river in western Boyacá and the lovers of Colombia’s best-known emerald legend. Spanish Wikipedia credits the written legend to Julio Roberto Garavito.^[1]

The legend is tied to a real landscape: two hills facing each other across the Minero river, Fura in San Pablo de Borbur and Tena in Pauna.^[5]

The version told in the region

Oral tradition: told locally, not confirmed by documents

Are, the creator, shaped Fura and Tena and gave them eternal youth on one condition: that they love only each other. Then came Zarbi. Fura broke the promise. Tena discovered the betrayal and died.

Fura wept. Her tears became emeralds and her cries became butterflies. Are turned the two of them into mountains, and in one version Zarbi became the torrent that keeps them apart: the Minero river. This is the version we heard on the road and tell in Fuego Verde, episode 2.

The enemy-tribes version

Another version, given on Spanish Wikipedia’s page about the Fura emerald, makes the lovers children of two chiefs of enemy tribes who fell in love against their families’ will; after a lovers’ quarrel Tena dies and both become rivers and mountains of emeralds.^[2]

Spanish Wikipedia’s article on the Tena emerald tells it with a harder ending: Tena takes his own life, and Fura’s tears become emeralds.^[3]

The version in English

The English-language version most readers find makes Fura and Tena two immortals created by the Muisca god Are to populate the earth. Fura was unfaithful; both lost their immortality, aged and died, and Are, taking pity, turned them into crags protected from storms and serpents, in whose depths Fura’s tears became emeralds.^[4]

That telling has no Zarbi and gives the hills a protective role: they are “the official guardians of Colombia’s emerald zone”.^[4]

What changes between versions

The constants are the broken promise, Tena’s death and the tears that become emeralds.^[1] The people change: Muisca in English^[4], Muzo in the Spanish tradition tied to the hills.^[1] So does the cause of the tragedy, an outsider in one telling and feuding families in another.^[2]

• Who is unfaithful: Fura, in every version we found.
• Who dies first: Tena.
• The third character: Zarbi in the regional telling; absent in English.
• The river: the Minero, sometimes Zarbi himself transformed.

The hills themselves

The hills are real and separated by the Minero river.^[1] Which one is taller depends on which article you read.^[4]

Heights vary by source. Spanish Wikipedia’s article on the hills gives Tena about 840 meters and Fura about 500^[1]; its article on Borbur gives Fura 800 meters^[5]; English Wikipedia gives the same two figures with the hills swapped.^[4]

Fura stands in the vereda of San Isidro, in San Pablo de Borbur; Tena rises opposite, in Pauna.^[5] The forest around them is known for its butterflies, the blue Morpho among them, which keeps one detail of the legend visible.^[1]

Emeralds named Fura and Tena

In 1999 a mine in Muzo produced an uncut crystal of about 11,000 carats, 2.2 kilograms, and named it Fura after the legend.^[2]

Tena, around 2,000 carats and dark green, came out the same year and is described as the more valuable of the two.^[3] Both are told on our famous-emeralds page.

Seeing them

Field notes: what we saw in the region

From Chanares you can walk to a viewpoint through forest full of butterflies. From there the legend stops being a story: Fura on one side, Tena on the other, and the Minero running between them.