Pederneira: A Rainbow of Colors

tourmaline it's found all over the world it's cut into gems it's made into jewelry and it's collected in its natural mineral state as it comes out of the ground just like you see it here it comes red green blue pink purple just about any color of the rainbow they come short and stubby long and delicate on matrix or even as single crystals the variety of tourmalines that exist must surely make it the most diverse species of the mineral world and each locality makes a slightly different tourmaline knowledgeable people can just look at a tourmaline and know where it's from and while each locality imparts its own unique fingerprint on the stone there is one place that's famous not only for the outstanding quality of tourmalines but also for the variety found in one local that place is called the petronaira mine in minas gerais brazil and this is the story [Music] it was given to me by my parents i'm a family and it worked out well for me because deca is a lot easier to say than jose oliveira and that's deca he's the owner of the land and he owns the entire mountainside he owns the mine and he's the patriarch of santa maria which loosely translates to saint mary of the sweet river he's about 90 plus years old i think he's around 93 and he's in great health and claims that he can still bite clean through a chicken bone he's very proud of that he's uh he's a wonderful man and a real fun character in the the scene of paige and era [Music] this mine here just behind me was uncovered by floats the entire hillside was a coffee plantation from top to bottom back then coffee was worth a lot of money it started to glimp in 1942 as the head of the coffee trade has just begun and mr sebastian ferreira who leave it over there just behind me in the house that you can see only the land at the time his brother pacheco came to visit him one day and on one night there were very strong rains rains that caused landslides and created plenty of damage after the rains pacheco went to the river to wash his face since there was no pipette water to the houses then while pacheco was cleaning and washing his face he found some plates of mika that had washed down in the floating mikka was worth something then in the nearby town of polla there was a big mega trait and so he said brother you have great reaches there just blocks of mika i found down at the water down there at the stream we call pedernera it worth lots of money so pacheco returned her to foyer with the mika he found and the people saw the value above it right away they asked where did you find this mika he said i found it there there at pederna i know the place very well so the traders from poga came to pedernera and found mr sebastian they said we heard that the mika was from here and you know mika has a good value much better than a crop of coffee so they offered him a deal toward the land for mika and they said it will cost you nothing you will make lots of money money will come to your hands and you do nothing at all he was not sure about the mika but in the end he went along with it and he took the deal they showed up with trucks and people to work and went about digging for mika and distributed what they found heavily amongst them and the money began to come in sebastian was pleased and they even pulled up some good coffee plants to dig for mikka and the drop in mika value kane it came and that was that it was over was someone who really motivated me he pushed me to buy the land from sebastian he was a cook for pacheco and he told me decca i remember vividly that after the drop in mega prizes pacheco filled up a crate with colored stones and then some of the red stones started coming out and he filled up another crate he filled up two crates one of redstones one of blue stones at the time the stones had a low economic value but i thought it meant something and so i took a chance and i bought the land my name is i came here in 1985. i came to work in the mine here behind me for over 11 years we left on march 12 1995. that's 11 years of strain meaning this stone production was constant for over five years we did not stop producing stones we found lots of rubber lid in the mine plenty of it big crystals so big they split in half it was red very red there must be over 500 to 600 kilos we mined it and mined stones some of it changed and it became collector material in certain areas of the mine all in different colors green and yellows and the quantity of crystal was a lot exactly how much i'm not sure but it was a lot in three big pockets there must be near three tons of just crystals just crystals without matrix was three tones pieces with matrix were another three tones and there were big pieces tourmaline on albin and feldspar it all came out all this material was just lying in the pocket the crystals just pour out and the matrix pieces were pried out and had a great combinations of feldspars and with all bites and of course tourmaline then the productions began to slow down almost do nothing so dillo the man who was running the mine gave the order to blow up the work site use dynamite he said to bless the tunnels and close the mind and that was the end the mind was closed [Music] ever since i left i always had hopes to come back here because i felt the mind has a great future no i don't think i'm sure it does then one day i was approached by mpedernita ltd to come back and work the mine again and so i took the opportunity and here we are again working the mine it's been five straight years of work just to clean and prepare the mind after all the blasting so many years ago and here we are at the beginning of a whole new future so in 1999 the first pocket was found that sparked the new era here at pioneer and it was found by a local miner who actually had used to work in the lower tunnel in delos tunnel and he was walking around he has a farm right here at paganera at the mining site and he was walking around in the the woods and up the mountain and up 40 meters he found a uh he found a little outcrop and he decided to begin to mine it and after a few months of mining and going in about 10 meters they encountered this first pocket and this pocket was something extraordinary i mean if if you see the material that came out from it you instantly recognize it it is not something that can be forgotten easily it's uh beautiful stuff the um the pocket has a wonderful story it was found unfortunately this pocket was likely collapsed and it which is typical for ninety percent of all the pockets that are found at pagonera right and yet the remnants are some of the finest tourmalines in the world what was actually uh preserved for collectors to enjoy and it was stolen by miners we believe dada does not have any claim to having dug it out and the pocket was then brought to valadares by some intermediary dealer who had a relationship with sinclair fonseca who is affectionately known to his friends and family and actually to most people as kk and kk immediately recognized the importance of the pocket not only from a collecting standpoint which is what most mineral collectors now uh recognize the pocket for but from a gem value from a lapidary value as the the crystals of tourmaline were flawless and an incredible chrome green what made the pocket uh really spectacular was something unique that i've only seen here in pagonera on two occasions this being the first is lepidolite now lepidolite normally is common and found in pegmatites all around the world but i had never seen and i don't think anyone has ever seen these elongated crystals really individual crystals up to almost an inch in length and about the thickness of a pencil in groups and and irradiating from central areas and the color was just the most vibrant beautiful rose pink to red color i mean it was striking this combination of contrast with this chrome green tourmaline and then just right on the crystals and surrounding the crystals uh this beautiful lepidolite lepidolite and just bursts of color and that i mean it was just like a one-two punch you saw this color and you were just like blown away so kk uh he gets the the the pocket brought to him in bolidaris he immediately recognizes the importance and he buys the pocket held it there for a week or so and then packed it and carried it with him to tucson by the time kk had taken off to go to tucson people knew here in valadar i said in brazil that this pocket was something special and so a local dealer named pierre lavelle french foreign dealer living here in brazil and he had a very close relationship with a very well-known dealer in the united states wayne thompson and wayne and pierre had probably a decade-long relationship maybe even longer of where pierre would scout out different finds in brazil he would purchase them and supply them to wayne and so pierre immediately grabbed a flight and flew from brazil straight to phoenix and so he waited in phoenix for kkk to arrive at the airport and kk arrived at the airport and of course to his surprise as soon as he comes out of baggage claim there's pierre lavelle and he was shocked he was like what are you doing here what do you what what's going on and pierre lavelle begins to tell him i know you have a pocket of tourmaline i know it's supposed to be fantastic i'm here to buy it and so they met somewhere in the airport they found a convenient location and kk opened up the pocket showed it to pierre lavelle and pierre bought it on the spot within a half an hour pierre left the airport and drove down to wayne thompson's house and laid the material out on the table and wayne's eyes exploded when he saw this material he knew right away that this was something really special it had not not been seen before and i would imagine within a three-day span prior to the tucson's show that pocket was dispersed and collectors ate it up like candy i mean that some of the pieces are just phenomenal as far as their impact and the color and the contrast with that lepidolite made something so special when you see it when you see the the pieces that came out you're you're awestruck and so is the rest of the world is amazing fine [Music] after keckab bought the pocket he went to united states to sell at the tucson show and he sold his merchandise to pierre laville and when he get at the show keke told to his friend miranda he bought a beautiful lot of tourmaline and he make a good profit in it so miranda called his friend tomishi valadares and asked about where this trumaline is producing right now he heard is santa rosa mine and tomish is very close friend of mine and he knows i own santa rosa mine and immediately he called me to ask a question about that pocket and i answered to him i don't know yet thomas so i went to the mining to look with the around if produce something like that there and it's not there so i came back and told tomish it's not the atomish must be in some place else so thomish started to look around and in a few days he found out was in another place somebody told tomish was in a veterinarian so he went to the veterinarian to see each place it is for his surprise he met his friend iostacco nervous at the pedernira because ostekneps was a partner with dada so they talk and they start some kind of partnership with ostakio and dada sotomish went back to valadars and told me the history and invite me if i want to be a partner with them so we made a partnership miranda came from the states we sit on the table that time i have a new compression i put the compression in a in a partnership we became partners that's the beginning the era of da da tony the first pocket we hit was the citrine pocket and that time aldo's partners was very excited to found something so when they gave they when they called us they found a park everybody came all those partners came to the mine to see the pocket and the parked walls big that big maybe four four meters long and a lot of quartz and citrine and we found a good material but the the two good ones was the our bite with some tourmaline in the bottom and that longer beautiful beautiful citrine and the odd one was two big citrine complete clean and like a cathedral in the top perfect no damage so everybody is happy but no turmeric the best pieces from this pocket this quartz pocket were there were two uh there were many smaller pieces and the quality of the crystals they had this very nice hint of citrine they weren't very very orangey or yellow they just had a beautiful hint of citrine which was it was nicer than some of the darker citrine quartz that comes from throughout brazil and around the world because they had lots of life and combining that that just hint of color with exceptionally sharp prismatic crystals that were they didn't have interruptions on the prism faces or on the termination faces they were nice and flat so there wasn't a lot of this windowing or or multi-growth on the crystal faces with outrageous luster bright bright bright these crystals danced in a light you'd put a light anywhere and there were two really marvelous examples uh one of them a little bit better than the other and i actually was lucky enough to buy those two pieces when i came on my first trip to brazil in 2000 the pocket produced maybe half a ton of quartz in all varying degrees and again it was dumb luck what survived they blasted into the pocket they found the pocket they blasted to remove material from the pocket using rudimentary tools and only by dumb luck were these two incredible specimens preserved the way they were one of them was a plate about as big as i'm gesturing probably about two feet wide two feet across and about four or five inches thick of just beautiful slightly undulating um uh cleveland with this bluish hue and little tiny tourmalines coming out here and there maybe four or five crystals right in the center of this was a crystal about oh probably six or seven inches across and about 20 to 22 inches tall and it just came up like this perfect beautiful skyscraper coming right out of a white matrix and had this light citrine color and it was absolutely perfect it didn't have a ding a nick a chip on it anywhere this was a one of the finest quartz specimens i'd seen in my life to that day and it's one of the finest court specimens i've seen another decade later so i was very happy to get that piece um the other piece that came in that pocket that i also bought was two quartzes that were very much like uh smokestacks they were side by side sort of in the foreground of a matrix of albite that went behind it and each crystal was about 18 inches tall and about four to five inches in diameter absolutely water clear and these two had a little bit of stepping as they went up very much like on a church or on a on a cathedral with these little steps in and out and but beautiful luster no damage just wonderful examples of of crystal quartz um two of my favorite pieces and they have a very special meaning to me because it it brought it was the very first purchase i made at the from the paginara group so to speak the paginara partnership and from this mine and it brought me into uh it it was the beginning of my working with paginaire material which has dramatically changed my life uh this experience of working with pedianera experiencing these pockets now for a decade i look back and i just wish i could rewind the clock and do it all over again it was in 2000 uh right during the tucson show there's a dealer named michelle jacques and he's a mid-range dealer he's french lives in france his wife is brazilian and he travels to and from brazil and he was traveling from there and dealing in brazilian minerals for probably 30 years um and he and i struck up a conversation during the tucson show and we started talking about brazil and he told me you know i can get you material from brazil there's great things happening there and so my my interest which had been sort of skirted to the side and i was concentrating on these other countries started to get peaked a little bit and i said well okay if if you can put me in contact with someone or you really think there's something special coming from brazil um i'm interested to to to do something with you i'd love to to see what you can put me in contact with so michelle jacques goes to brazil he's there for like a month and uh he stays there and on his way back he uh arrives in new york and he didn't call me once during his whole absence didn't tell me about anything and he arrives and says to me yeah there was some great productions but um you know there was no way to buy it there was brokers in the way and but i have some photos to show you and so he starts showing me photos and boom he whips out this photo of sharon stone they call it sharon stone because it was so beautiful and at that time in brazil sharon stone was a a very iconic female figure for beauty and and whatnot and so they named this specimen after her sharon stone and they call it obviously the sharon stone pocket and this specimen was you know totally like nothing i'd ever seen before from anywhere um and you know i hadn't had much experience in 2000 nearly as much as i have now with tourmaline uh with that species but i'd seen what i'd seen from you know the blue cat pocket i'd seen what i'd seen about from jonas i've seen what was coming out of afghanistan and pakistan and i didn't see anything like this before and so i was my eyes were just like whoa i got to get this rock i've got to get this specimen and i said how could you leave this piece in brazil michelle you've got to go back i was to call brazil now and he he looked at me like i had five heads he was like i've got to go home my wife is waiting for me i've been away for a month or two months whatever it was that was there in brazil he said i'm not i can't go back to brazil now i was like well i gotta go and he said what do you mean you gotta go i was like call the guy on the phone so we're in my my mother's house i was still living there i was only 26 years old and i i remember picking up the phone in the kitchen dialing the telephone number and he put me in contact with uh zay manezes who has become one of my great friends and and he's also my partner in padianera and i went and immediately went to the brazilian consulate in new york applied for a brazilian visa um i got a visa within i think 24 to 48 hours i bought a plane ticket and off i went just blind into the wild blue yonder uh michelle jacques did not want to accompany me because he needed to get home and i just wanted to get on spot and so i finally found myself in valedares after a long drive from bella horizonte and i found myself in zamaneses office and the pieces were all wrapped up and i said to them well you know i would really love to see the pieces and they said well we'd really love to show you but we can't the pieces are already sold and i said oh my god this is terrible this is this is i'm all this way can i even see them no you can't see them they actually showed me sharon stone but they showed it to me in a ball of paper about this big and they put the piece on the table and it was wrapped and it was sealed and it was signed with the names of the partners so that they could prove to the owner who had purchased the pocket that um that it wasn't uh you know that no one had seen it since they had sealed it together and uh i sat there and i just looked at this ball and i knew what was inside and i was like why can't i it was it was just the biggest tease in the world ironically uh the the the brokers and the dealers who had purchased the the sharon stone pocket they ignored the court's pocket because the court's pocket was sort of less important and obviously it was at the time i mean it was only courts but these two court specimens were sitting in this room at the menezes office and they were just sort of on the sides and i had been looking at them while pacing around the table 20 times trying to convince them to show me the piece and that they wouldn't show me and i said well you know guys i i am really interested in working with this mind i can tell that this is something unique this doesn't happen every day and i had this gut feeling that i wanted to get involved and so i said okay here's what i'm going to do let's do some business here are these quartz pieces sold and i i assumed that they were and they said no and i said okay great let's negotiate for these two quartz pieces and so i bought the two quartz pieces and i said i really want next shot at the next pocket that you guys find i mean i'm here ready to go i have money um i'm your man i want to work with you i want to do something and they said well we can't really do something because uh the group who bought this last pocket well they're getting preference and i was like oh man this is tough and and said but then zay said something to me says but you know what we're going to do from the next pocket we hit we're going to hold one great piece for you and we're just gonna hold that one piece for me and i said ah all right great i said there's my foot in the door after we found you know a few pockets we figured out we need somebody to help us sell this material because was a lot of material and everybody has experience in cut stuns not in the specimens in that time i receive a call from united states of daniel trincillo he wants to see the merchandise so i thought to him welcome so he came in two days i was surprised because i expect him come in two three weeks so he came to my office and we started to talk and he wants to buy the tourmalines but the tourmalines we already sold to another person and the person sealed the lot and i cannot show danny alterinchillo so i told danny i'm sorry this is already gone and we have a chance to next pocket to show you in that time he saw two quarks was on a table while citrine very nice and and he told me okay if i don't get the tourmalines i want to buy those parts so he asks the price and we make the deal with the squads so he's happy not really happy because he wants the turbulence and we cannot sell to to him that time so after deal he told me i don't need the squads right now you can keep here and when i you found another pact i came and i take the quartz i did this because if i give you my card of course you're gonna remember but if i buy the piece and leave the money with you you're going to remember for sure the next part we found was the proud pocket the prod pact was a bi-color tourmaline was a big quantity of crystals and quartz and the matrix and we keep one good piece i mean big piece because we thought is good to cut and we sold to the the park to another dealer so after we sold we called daniel trincillo and i told him danielle we are proud to keep our word to show a peace so we agreed and we did a partnership with danielle and right after sharon stone pocket came the proud pocket and um i get a call daniel we hit a pocket come to brazil okay so packed up got on a plane arrived in brazil about a few days later and i came into valedares and i went again to zemenez's office and i believe at that time they had just started an office for the company for m pedianera which was the firm and they had the pocket there and they brought me in and they said daniel we're keeping our word and we're happy that we're doing it and we're proud to show you this wonderful specimen and i said what can i see the whole pocket and they said well there's a few pieces out in the other room we'll show you quickly so they brought me around the room and at that time i looked at the pieces and i was like oh my god i was like i can't buy these can i and they were like nope they're all sold it's all gone it's like but we have one specimen for you and i was like okay let me see what i got so they brought me into this other room and they had on the table uh a specimen that was enormous it had to be almost two feet long and about a foot and a half deep and some 18 inches tall and i was shocked and i mean it looked like there was a small boat on the table and i'm looking at it and i'm like what could this be and right in the center i could see a uh what looked like a a a little indentation sticking up from underneath the one level that seemed to be the continuous level of whatever the piece was and so they did the unveiling and i was like oh my god i was blown away there was this giant green capped tourmaline that looked very much like the blue cap tourmalines from uh the pallet district in california except this one had a vibrant green cap and the same sort of red cherry red pink body of the main part of the crystal um the only difference is that the green cap was a good uh quarter inch maybe even um 5 8 of an inch thick which you know the crystals from the palette district have a very thin blue cap they are you know no more than a few millimeters where this was you know significant and this contrast between the two colors in the same crystal this super deep vibrant green above this red color was just you know this knockout one two punch and it was sitting on this giant quartz crystal surrounded by albite and surrounded by other tourmaline crystals and i was i knew right away that this was going to be an amazing specimen and it was just now to figure out how to negotiate it with them that was going to be the trick the next pocket we found was the rocket pocket that time i was at home and the guys from here called me and they said they hit a puck and they already found some pieces and i told him okay i'm gonna be there tomorrow morning close the the tunnel and wait for me to to see take the pocket so in the morning i buy i buy something in a town and then i went to the mining to my surprise when i arrived in the mining they already blaster so i complained to the guy how you did this why don't you ate me oh the i did so i i told him i want to go to the tony when i get into the tunnel a lot of smoking in in it and bored a little bit my eyes and i was almost crying because they blew the the pocket all over the the floor jesus i thought to the guy look what you did so he took a bag and started to pick the the pieces on the floor and put in a bag and i couldn't say one word because i was so upset and i have no words to describe that damage that time i i almost cry shortly after uh the proud pocket came the rocket pocket uh it was in the beginning of 2001 and the rocket pocket was found literally right over here i can throw a rocket where it was right there in that little indentation that came out into this cavity somewhere in the neighborhood of probably three four feet and this was my first major pocket with paginara that i was able to partner with them because up until this time the entire pockets were sold to other dealers and i came i got the call and i was told to come to brazil right away we've hit a pocket and i got on a plane and i came to look at the material and i was flabbergasted i mean i was blown away i come into this room and my eyes i was just i just stood in aw and i'll never forget this there's a restaurant in baladares named carnegie pinella and i was outside and we were having dinner and i was on my cell phone and i was calling back to the united states speaking with friends and family and people who i did business with and i was literally like jumping up and down the street you're not going to believe these term blades it's just unbelievable you don't understand what's here there's hundreds of crystals they're all gem what do you mean gem they're gem they're gem they're gem they're clean they're gem crystals and i was just like oh my god i mean the the the excitement was something that if i could bottle and take a sip of every once in a while i'd be a very happy man um and so would everybody else they could take a sip it was it was really it was it was an awesome experience in the night time the same day we went to the place to have some beer and some food the name of the bar is carne de panel and everybody was happy to to sell the pact i mean made up another partnership with danielle and danielle called me in the corner i want to talk to you okay danielle what about i know i think you like more you love more dostor malin than the other partners i want to tell something that that party we make a deal today if is not destroyer like this we can make five six times more you you must go to the mine and be sure you cannot do this again because i'm lost money and you guys lost money too that's the time i figured out i have to pay more attention to to the parks i started to learn with danielle and he started to help us to understand how we need to take the pockets so there's these these multi-faceted terminations pointing straight up shaped like the top of a rocket and this uh this phenomenon is something that happens naturally in the pockets and there's this fibrous layer in between the pink and the outside skin or rind of the green and when that breaks it comes off like a sheath and the pink center is now visible immediately to the eye and it's not obstructed by the rind anymore and but the top of the crystal is still intact and so what you have is what looks like a rocket one of them the rocket was the most specific you know it was the one that gave the namesake to the pocket because it looked so much like a rocket and it was the highest quality of the three rocket uh crystals that were discovered the actual reason these pieces exist is because the pocket was destroyed had the pocket been taken out intact these rockets would not be rockets and the pocket would have been named something else i'm a hundred percent sure that not withstanding the pocket produced some of the most beautiful specimens that we've seen up until that time there were probably at least still even though there were very few matrixes preserved from the collection of the prop pocket there were probably about 10 or 15 matrix specimens with tourmalines repaired oftentimes but of this vibrant green gem tourmaline sitting on these white blades of cleveland mixed with just a little touch of of quartz and a little touch of of lepidolite here it was just really the aesthetics and the the total beauty of the specimens that came out had never been seen before but at that time in 2001 that pocket was one of the most major tourmaline pockets in the world one of the next pockets that came up in 2001 which was about four or five months after the rocket pocket is one of my favorite pockets and we call it the afghan pocket we call it the afghan pocket because the tourmaline that was produced from the pocket looks very much like the very light pastel tourmalines that are produced from afghanistan from the lagman area and they they have a very light green to uh and a light pink and these were slightly more intense than that but they they were reminiscent of um this sort of pastel color that i'd seen from afghanistan and so we called it the afghan pocket and the unfortunately the pocket was very small the interesting thing is probably the the the four best pockets or four of the nicest most unique pockets i won't say best because all the pockets are amazing from here where the smaller pockets and they can produce even though a pocket is small it can produce incredible material and the afghan pocket was a perfect example of that phenomenon the quality was outrageous we're talking tourmalines that that reached almost 10 12 inches fantastic luster luster from the afghan pocket was just the best you could hope for on tourmaline and they were gem gem gem and it it's a bi-color tourmaline so the bottoms of the tourmalines are bright vivid red so the tourmaline goes from gem green to absolutely clear and that stripe is probably a quarter of an inch in thickness and then it continues back to the green and then has a distinct line and goes to the red and so i mean you can you can lay out 100 tourmalines from pockets all around the world and i can in two minutes pick out the ones from the afghan pocket unfortunately this was not a big pocket i wish it was a huge pocket this was again very reminiscent of the afghan pocket it was a small pocket it was beautiful quality it was actually the finest quality for cutting that pagina had produced till date it was a blue with just a hint of green just the right amount of green and it was just gorgeous and the crystals were very thick they were uh somewhere in the neighborhood of uh probably an inch inch and a quarter in diameter and they were it was bi-color so they started off with a a a reddish core for the first couple of inches and then just went into gem blue sections and the crystals were long they were you know probably up to 15 inches and again this goes back to paginara being this wonderful variety i mean every pocket is different and this pocket was phenomenal the crystals were big they were gem blue they had this bi-color bottom and they had some very little matrix in this pocket the big blue pocket that time they found i was in denver show with danielle and after two days arrived there i called to the mining and they told me they found a pocket and they told was very good material so that time is the first time we have a lock those piece walls hang up in the top of the pocket so that's why they could not break so they took perfect because while hanging and the only thing they must do is take like a apple that's it big blue one of my favorite minerals in the world is this tourmaline we call big blue uh i've had it up on my website it's on zaminazis's card it's been photographed for posters it's in books it is one of the finest tourmaline specimens in the world bar none it has a quality that you expect in a specimen that is a that is a miniature that is something two inch by two inch you know minerals in general for collectors are found in more perfect conditions when they're smaller they're easier to remove they're the likelihood of something being produced in a fist-sized quality in absolute perfection is much higher than something being produced in this size in that same condition well big blue is a a contradiction to that rule it is absolutely perfection there's no other way to describe it it's a ball of white albite about a little bit smaller than that of a soccer ball and coming right out of the center is a tourmaline crystal that is about six inches across and pretty much round so it's six inches diameter and it comes straight up about nine or ten inches and it perfectly flat termination growing to the analogous pole and when i tell you that there is not a nick a ding a scratch on the entire edge of this tourmaline even that's not enough of a dramatic statement to tell you how perfect this is and then couple that with a flat termination that has not a ripple not a wave nothing in it whatsoever it is as if it was machined in a machine shop perfectly flat and the luster is incredible the luster is the brightest shiniest luster you can ever imagine it's not gem but it it passes light just fine when it's it's put in a showcase on a beautiful ball of white albeit blades with a little bit of lepitolite here and there and then it has a second crystal right to the the right of the the main crystal and it's slightly lower in the foreground and it's about an inch and a half in diameter and has the exact same termination is growing in in in the same way so you have the larger one here and the second one right here separated by about five inches and they both show this beautiful color i mean it is one of the world's greatest minerals i've ever seen from anywhere condition color luster quality form aesthetics it has it all the other amazing piece from the pocket was the wave the wave was a specimen that was it had to have been just near the big blue piece it had to be just near big blue and it was a little bit larger than big blue same identical quality the the razor sharp termination the glassy top and the the brilliance of the the tourmaline was just amazing and it like big blue grew on a mound of this incredible albite with this beautiful light pink lepidolite flowers erupting on top of the albite and then right in the center you had one crystal that was probably about eight inches in diameter and about six or seven inches tall and about uh it was a little elongated and it was a little bit more deep than it was wide and the top termination from the most advantageous display angle was uh flat razor sharp and then right at the last back part there was this wave where it came up and it had this little secondary peak and it's uh it's hard to see but if you actually light that peak it's a late stage growth of another uh tourmaline um and it grew right on top and continued the termination and it's a dark dark purple it's like a a deep indigo violet sort of color it's really fun when you put a light on the back of it that piece is one of the all-time great specimens that's ever been found in pagionera and the combination to have big blue in one pocket and the wave in the same pocket was just you know unbelievable it's uh i wish we could find more pockets like that big blue pocket was an amazing pocket and the interesting thing is all the tourmalines from this pocket all grew towards the analogous pole most of the tourmalines i find at paginair are growing towards the antiligas pole but these all grew towards the analogous pole and we find when they grow towards the analogous pole here they're growing much more robust much more large and that's what was happening here in big blue this was this pocket was to die for it was one of my favorite pockets against not a big pocket incredible quality and just showing again the diversity of pagonera that was the big blue pocket i wish i could find more of those for sure the grand parked was a green tourmaline with some matrix of quartz that pocket uh when the we hit the puck i wasn't here and i was in the beginning that pocket so open the park what we make a small hole you you look inside and you can see a lot of tourmalines in a pocket and quartz and everything mess we found we were able to remove this pocket intact and bring out a large amount of the matrixes one piece the name of the pocket is grand dong which means in portuguese or translates to like the big chief or the the the head honcho or the the big guy the the dawn you know and thinking in a mafia movie or something like this this is the the grand dong and we removed one specimen uh it was somewhere in the neighborhood of i'd say it's almost almost three feet across and about two and a half to three feet tall originally it's been trimmed down to lose some weight and it's about 18 inches deep and it's this beautiful matrix of white bladed clevelandite undulating from one side to the other and right in the background are three giant gem clean citrines very much like the citrines in the very first pocket or the the second pocket they ever found here in da da's tunnel the quartz the citrine pocket and then in front of that are tourmalines and there are no less than 100 gem green tourmalines exactly the same quality as the rocket pocket shooting out in every direction i mean this specimen took six months to find all the pieces that went to because it was such a large matrix and you could see all the spots and we had all these crystals that came out from the grand dong pocket that we needed to find them and find the fits and we did and the result is a masterpiece i mean it is unique in the world of tourmalines it's there is nothing else like it it's one of the finest specimens that's ever been produced from paganera and one of the finest tourmalines in the world there were other specimens that came out probably another 10 or 15 matrix pieces and numerous beautiful tourmalines that were of the same type as the rocket pocket but again because the collecting because our our awareness and our education in the collecting process they were much fewer repairs in retrieved and preserved in much better condition and they're they're gorgeous they're just absolutely beautiful this pocket was enormous it was probably somewhere in the realm of uh five meters or 15 feet in length and at least two or three feet across and two or three feet high and inside this pocket was a incredible amount of gorgeous blue tourmaline but what made this pocket different was that it had not been blown into it hadn't been destroyed there were no fewer than uh 300 to 400 crystals that came out that were removed intact unrepaired so instead of a single crystal that's 10 inches long having 10 repairs they have none or one or two which made for an incredibly different look in the finished product of when we were able to put the specimens back where they grew the pieces were dramatic they were gem they were beautiful and there were lots of them and there's a couple of my favorites from this pocket one of my favorites from this pocket i call the smokestacks it's a specimen about the size of what i'm showing with my arms and it has in the center two giant smokestacks about five inches across growing side by side on this matrix and then at the same time you have these other long gem crystals shooting out in all different directions really one of the most impactful specimens you've ever seen from tourmaline from anywhere in the world and it's it's these blue crystals on this white albeit matrix with lepidolite in just all the right spots it's really dramatic and incredible that's the smokestacks and that's probably my favorite specimen we hit the pocket and no mud inside when you look through the hole you can see three meters ahead and you can see the tourmalines unbelievable so again we started to open very carefully and that time i take a water and spray water and looks more nice and we have some pictures after those parked we we took it and again we spent a few weeks to take that pocket and was long crystals some b termination and the color was very good kind of blue and a lot of leptolites and i think we spend almost one month to take the whole pocket and unbelievable this part i miss that pocket the bicolor steel pocket was not big pocket we hit the the pocket and i look and i i didn't see quartz in it so i was afraid to don't have those tourmalines inside so i started to work very carefully and then i see one piece was perfect by color i think the most beautiful piece i see my life and i'm very happy to to be here talk this histories to you guys because only few persons can have an opportunity to to found a specimen like this in 2004 pagan era set itself apart from just being a mind that produces incredible tourmalines to a mine that produced minerals that not only compete with tourmalines around the world but compete with the finest minerals from that have ever been found from anywhere it had done so once before and i would say that was the big blue pocket and the big blue tourmaline is a specimen that rivals and can sit next to the top 20 minerals found from any find of any type around the world well it did it again in 2004 and it produced what we call the bicolor steel pocket bicolor steel was a small pocket it produced no more than 15 or 20 crystals entirely and of those crystals the matrixes were well retrieved the repairs were so few and the matrixes were so intact it it's almost like the the thought that chance favors the prepared mind they were prepared they were ready they found this pocket and they pulled it out and by chance it's the finest quality tourmaline the mine has produced bar none it's bi-color tourmaline the crystals reached somewhere i'd say the tallest crystal was about 10 or 11 inches there's a distinct break right in the center so 50 of the crystal grows up in an intense red then there is very much like the afghan pocket a very clear line and every crystal from the pocket exhibits this exact line no matter how big or how small actually i take that back not every crystal every crystal growing towards the antilogous pole exhibits this every crystal from the pocket because there were also some smaller crystals that grew with flat terminations as opposed to terminations that have small facets those flat termination crystals are growing towards the analogous pole and those were blue caps so they were red with a small blue cap and those in the pocket were actually quite small they only reached a few inches uh maybe an inch and a half to two whereas these long crystals growing to the antilogous pole were they were breathtaking and all of those crystals had this dna trait so typical for paginera to assign to a pocket and right at the transition between the red and the blue of the top is a clear line that's about a quarter inch thick and it's on every crystal in the exact same spot and so it produced this specimen that is affectionately known as bicolor steel uh bicolor steel is one of the most incredible mineral specimens i've ever had the pleasure of observing seeing holding admiring period it sits next to the rabbit ears tourmaline the dragon gold the phosphophyllite it is among the finest for several reasons first of all it has perfection of form the aesthetics are to die for it has three crystals growing out from a central matrix all in the perfect perfect proportion to each other they're not spread too far they're not too close they're just right and each one of them is gem from bottom to top and they're growing out of a contrasting matrix in just the right way and it's incredible that this specimen the main crystal is actually a group of crystals the main crystal in the center is three it's a tall crystal in the center with two side cars and that came off the matrix at its base in one intact piece so they're not repaired at all through the body of the of the entire crystal they are only separated at from the matrix at the base and lock right on so from a visual standpoint you cannot see one repair in the crystal the second crystal coming off to the right is a single crystal of the same length as the main crystal and that comes out at to the right of it at about a 30 degree to 35 degree angle off of dead on to the main group of crystals and then coming to the left is another similar crystal that comes out on a similar angle from the main body of crystal so what you have is this this view of of so many things happening at once you have near to perfection of condition as perfect as you can imagine you have color striking color boom boom it just knocking you out with impact of this blue over the red with this little tiny white stripe that just sets it off just enough and it's in the perfect aesthetic form i mean you could not no one could have designed the piece any better than than it is it it's just it's a miracle and it is one of the world's finest mineral specimens bar none and it is likely to be argued that it is the finest tourmaline from pagian era by leaps and bounds uh next specimen that would compete would be big blue and it is one of the top three or four tourmalines in the world including what's been produced from jonas including what's been produced from barrett to salinas including what's been produced from afghanistan it stands alone in early 2005 they found another beautiful pocket it was actually reminiscent of the sharon stone and the proud pocket it was a bi-color pocket with not a lot of gem material not a lot of cutting it was beautiful in color the two colors were very intense and the matrix was a beautiful stark white bladed albite different than the bluish thin blades of clevelandite that we'd seen with most pockets they were more robust and more just stark white and it created this fantastic backdrop for these bi-colored tourmalines to be growing upon and the the best crystals ranged from you know four to five inches and grew both to the uh antillgas pole and to the analogous pole so you had terminations with pointing terminations and lots of facets and you had flat cut terminations and you had them both on the same specimen at the same time which produced this wonderful aesthetic and there was uh one large specimen it actually looked like a blue cap and it was probably the best specimen from the find and it was a tourmaline about eight inches tall and about this big around and it was is a little oval shaped so it lent to transparency and had a thick blue cap you know almost a quarter inch of a blue cap and it was on a beautiful white albeit matrix with two little side cars sort of coming at you and the specimen was a fantastic piece it was sold to collector lida hill from dallas and the nice thing to know is that her entire collection including this specimen will be donated to the perot museum of nature and science which is um exciting because the piece is going to be on display for people to admire and visit from now until the unforeseeable future so it's really great it was a great piece [Music] 2006 was upon us and dada's tunnel and all the work that you see was coming to an end the pockets were becoming less frequent they were becoming smaller in size there were a lot of empty pockets we were not finding the same signs that we were finding in the earlier years here at paydenera and things started to slow down and it was noticeable and we were working very hard to find what we did find and we had worked all the way to the end of the tunnel and back again to the front we searched the sides we went down we went up we hired geologists in here in brazil to come in and look at the mine and give us their advice we used ground penetrating radar gpr to try and ascertain where we might find pockets and follow those those indications all to no avail we uh we basically did everything that we could do and and our last pocket was hit in the end of 2006. there were only two pockets in 2006 the violet pocket violetta in portuguese and the gem blue and the gem blue pocket was the very last pocket and it was a small pocket it really only had one piece the violet pocket was a totally unique thing threw everybody for a loop because no one had ever seen this color before in tourmaline i still to this day have not seen it they are crystals that look very much the size and type of the porcupine pocket and the giant blue pocket instead of blue they're a violet color and i mean violet throughout it's not a little bit purple it's not hey it's kind of purple it's violet color totally unique and they're they're beautiful just the way they are with this this incredible violet color on these contrasting matrix of albite and lepidolite very impressive and very unique i don't know that i've ever seen this color of tourmaline in uniformity i've seen one little piece from this mine and one little piece from that mine that has a violet or a purplish color these are violet tourmalines of all things very different very cool um the last pocket the end of an error was here in 2006 somewhere in the middle of the year and it was a very small pocket we did not go off with a big giant major brouhaha there was one small pocket found it was the blue gem pocket and it was found probably in september of 2006. the pocket is called the blue gem pocket because there was one blue gem of a piece inside is a beautiful crystal with only one lock fit repair right at its base where it exits a beautiful little citrine crystal and the citrine is on the albeit so you have this albite plate with beautiful blades and one crystal right in the center of citrine quartz and right out of the center of that quartz is this blue gem and it's near to flawless after that we try in different ways we went to the left went to the right went to the back we spent about six months tried to found another pocket unfortunately we didn't have successful that's after that we decided to stop the dada and i think is the end of the era of dada tony [Music] that was the last pocket of 2006 and the last pocket of dada's tunnel the this incredible era of production after production of education for us as as miners and as mine owners for mineral collectors seeing the incredible abundance of this mine had all just come to an end and even though they mined here for another six or seven months after that and worked very hard going in all the different directions none of it showed any signs of what they had seen before and until now uh it seems that this mind will remain just a happy memory for many people and through living through the examples that are out there in collections today across the world in 1999 to 2007 i saw stuff come out of the ground that is shocking to me still to today and it's you know changed the landscape for tourmaline as a collectible and for collectors around the world i mean pagionera has become probably the premier collecting locality for the species i don't think there is another locality that has so much diversity of color of quality um of size types of combinations with other species and in different aesthetics that you could collect paginaire all into its own and so it's become a certain bar for the species that you know it's it's very sad to imagine that it's gone forever which we is what we thought it was and that was why we redirected to the lower tunnel we rede redirected to uh gilo's tunnel because we thought if the upper tunnel is tailing out and it's going to be gone we should redirect and see if there was anything left in the lower tunnel and see if we could maximize that and take some advantage there so we started working there and we started um cleaning that out and abandoned this upper working because what had happened was they came into the upper working which was hugely productive and there was this big gallery and room and what we figured out later was that the concentration of the pockets was all in one zone this is a map of the actual tunnel of paidonera and in this area right here these are all this is the main pocket zone there are pockets in different areas throughout but this concentration is is very indicative of the way a pegmatite would form and that represents the displacement off of the core zone of all the elements that are necessary to form tourmaline unfortunately um it took federico petsota about two years from 2007 2008 and into 2009 to really understand the geology at page and era it's not very straightforward and it was the type of thing that you needed to visit several times it needed to be mapped when i came the first time here in pedianera i was wondering what could be the impression of my first meeting with this extremely famous place to tell you the truth i was also a little bit jealous about this locality these localities of families so much turmeric from this surface so beautiful specimen and many of the specimen among the world's best specimen in the mineral world i wanted to see what was this pregnant in this mine and when i came here the level of the pegmatite was exactly at the level i was expecting something absolutely crazy i believe that here in perenera we can see the expression the the maximum expression of geological nature of the processes creating crystals and gems in nature and then we hired a geologist who works in conjunction with federico named andreadini to come in and andrea um another well-renowned pegmatite geologist and i should say that that dr patsota is also a pegmatite geologist so he has the specialty in this exact field and he's studied pegmatites across madagascar for 25 years so he has that background that we thought would be a really key key to have him on board on our team and so with getting a professional map done of all of the the workings what existed and and and getting it specifically to what is in space you know exactly the latitude longitude everything is all calculated and drawn to accuracy com combined with power washing the tunnel so that you could see the rock they were able then to look at it very differently i have never seen in my life such a big pegmatite producing pockets with tourmaline crystals this is i believe the major point of this pegmatite as large are pragmatized as complex they are if you compare this pegmatite to some pegmatites around the world producing sportsmen producing industrial spongymen producing industrial fastball producing industrial burial this is not a big pragmatic there are pegmatites which are 10 times even 100 times bigger than this one but if you have experience around the world about the pegmatites producing cavities pockets with beautiful tourmaline crystals this is a monster many of the most famous pegmatites producing turmeric crystals around the world are dykes 50 centimeter thick one meter thick two meter thick maybe 500 kilometers long but this is a pegmatite 10 meter 20 meter 30 meter thick and the vertical development is close to 100 meter the horizontal development maybe 150 200 meters this is really monster so the size of this pegmatite is what makes this pegmatite rather unique i'd say in early 2013 we determined that what we had was a pegmatite that we hadn't totally taken advantage of we haven't fully exploited by any means and what we found was that that we they had mined off track on a dipping trend the miners and gone outside the productive area into the more sterile horizontal uh pegmatite so the thought process was that there was a mirror zone on the other side over here potentially of this whole area which would basically be a whole new life to the mine and the question was is it there or isn't it there so that's what led to our drilling campaign that began in late april early may of 2014 and i was advised by dr patota and dr deeney to purchase and acquire a very small rig made by atlas copco that is called the diamec 232 and it is a core driller that can drill core holes within a tunnel in a small um a small area and is still able to drive 100 meters and so we could do core samples to go 100 meters and get back the the the cores and look at the results to to understand we began drilling in may of 2014 and we drilled a little over 800 meters of uh core and and pulled that out and that those core samples it's all very important that as they're collected they are kept exactly in their orientation they are all numbered they are all photographed they are all taken in a way to give the geologists the ability to study them and understand and if you if you switch core samples places it can have a dramatic effect on the results that are studied by the geologist and so we have to maintain a very stringent control on maintaining that the cores don't get mixed up and this is not easy to do in a mining environment there's a lot of hands involved accidents can happen tray can be dropped it's it's complicated but luckily we were very successful and when i saw the results of this machine and i was blown away because the the information that they were able to provide us the the the the real proof of geology i mean it was very black and white it's very simple to explain to everyone and you could literally see where the mineralization is occurring why it's occurring how it's related to the other workings we were able to drill from the upper tunnel and intersect the lower tunnel that's been productive we were able to determine that those two uh vertical bodies of pegmatite are two totally separate geological structures they are unrelated to each other you know we produced more core in less time than we thought we were going to and that was great and the yield was amazing being displaced from family being away from home for you know almost three months straight is difficult and so we weren't able to complete the entire campaign in one session we're starting the second one literally um i think in about eight days today is september 13th it's uh starting on september 20th so seven days from now one week from today they go back on site and they begin the second campaign which will also run for probably another 60 to 80 days and so we're excited you know the drilling campaign is is kicking off the second one that's really gonna say we're a hundred percent we're 99.99 now we're 100 plus simultaneously the mine's alive it's mining people are excited the miners are excited because we've got this new vision and we've got this new directive and and we we feel it's there and so i believe that within the next year or a year and a half we'll be able to share a whole new series of pockets and tourmaline with the collector and gem world that people have never seen before and that's going to be fun and exciting and so you know i feel like we're on the cusp of some greatness that comes could we be wrong absolutely i mean mining is mining there's no guarantees and you work really hard to try and find what you're looking for and you use the best common sense science everything that's at your disposal if you're if you're going at it and it could yield something wonderful and it could also disappoint so to be continued that's my optimism that's my conviction that god put that there for men and the men are us that god chose us to deliver all that's in there and we were not going to take it all of it out but a good part is going to come out a good party is going to come out so i think like this i don't know i don't know but i have the hope to still see many things [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] now [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: bluecapproductions

Views: 87,568

Rating: 4.8955822 out of 5

Keywords: Mineral, collecting, quartz, fluorite, calcite

Id: c-GclIdbSZ0

Length: 88min 32sec (5312 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020