“I don’t think most people have any idea what this opal mine is like,” said Iñaki Oyarvide, as we set off on our day tour, zipping along the highway to Magdalena, 76 kilometers (47 miles) northwest of Guadalajara.
“They think of tunnels and dust.”
I suppose I had been thinking of tunnels and I always think about dust and smoke, since I’m allergic to them. When we stopped zipping to wait in a 10-minute construction delay, I almost put my feet on the pristine dashboard of Iñaki’s Hilux as I took stock of my preconceptions. And yes, they did include dark tunnels. Of course, Iñaki had told me to bring a sun hat and water, which didn’t jive with the dark tunnel scenario.
I laid my preconceptions aside as we started zipping again. We zipped through El Arenal, a town with yellow arches stretching interminably along the highway, and we zipped through Amatitán with its memorable roadside shelves stocked with clear plastic jugs of tequila. “Very bad tequila,” Iñaki warned me, although I wasn’t even tempted to buy good tequila. My vices had already been taken care of by a stop at Starbucks on the outskirts of the city.
Entering Magdalena, preconceptions tumbled as we zipped past the town square where I had expected to encounter the myriad opal traders rumored to be hanging about. Instead, we twisted and turned to the home of Iñaki’s friend with the unforgettable name of Elpidio Serrana Villareal, who offered to accompany us to the San Martin mine. Iñaki enthusiastically accepted.
While Elipidio was explaining that he makes opal keychains to sell to shops in Magdalena and Iñaki was explaining that inside every Magdalena home you’ll find a cache of opals, I was distracted by Elpidio’s admirable, woven hat, and then by, of all things, the cobblestone street.
Was it really pink? I began taking pictures of it. “No, no,” Elpidio said, dismayed. “You’ll take better photos at the mine.” And then it dawned on me that all the streets in Magdalena were paved with pink cantera.
Cantera is the porous, flecked rock commonly used by Mexican architects and sculptors, the rock I could find no translation for, until I suddenly encountered a Wikipedia entry — “Cantera (stone)” — and learned it is a lightweight rock formed when volcanic dust combines with lava. Is unique to Mexico and can be pink, green, gold, brown, etc.
Cantera from the land around the Tequila Volcano is pink. (“Cantera” comes from the Spanish word for quarry, according to my trusty Wikipedia page, which, incidentally, needs additional citations for verification.) Okay, maybe peach or pinky beige—in fact, the earth I was about to see is the perfect color for my blusher.
Before heading up the mountain, with the Tequila volcano looming in the distance, we stopped at the small home of Mariano Gutierrez, a pulidor (polisher), where we dropped off 40 of Iñaki’s previously acquired rough opals. Gutierrez said he could either make them capuchin or cabochon (rounded) or chicoteado (more natural, with protuberances and holes partly intact). Opals are usually not appropriate for faceting, and instead are worked into domed ovals using trim saws and wheels. Gutierrez showed us his and pointed out a table where his little daughter works at the craft. All the stones Iñaki left for polishing were solid opals, but Gutierrez pulled out his trove of charming, inexpensive necklace stones (heart-shaped for Valentine’s Day), which were thinner opals surrounded by a matrix of contrasting cantera — opal doublets — and I bought one.
“It’s not a good idea to leave your opals with just any polisher,” Iñaki warned, since gem lovers the world over know the field is rife with deception, an example being exchanging your gem for another. Later, Iñaki pointed out a small shop where he had been hoodwinked.
“They overcharged me for a stone that wasn’t good,” he complained. Two months later, after his compadres identified the ruse, the shop took it back, but many people would never have returned, he grumbled.
Elpidio chimed in with tales about rapscallions who concoct fake opals of quien-sabe (who-knows-what) and treat low quality opals with heat to enhance their iridescence. “I can spot them with a lupa [a jewelers magnifying glass],” he assured us.
Things got pinker once we set off for the San Martin mine, a 20-minute drive over one-lane roads lined by low, pink cantera walls and big mounds of smallish, rough stones, the refuse from mines. Once inside San Martin, Iñaki stopped to greet the staff and we headed down another, even pinker, road, flanked by cliffs that climbed perhaps 50 meters high.
This, the heart of San Martin, was occupied by a giant Caterpillar excavator and 10 toiling men, including the friendly, Japanese-Mexican owner Satoshi Mochizuki and his teenage son of the same name. At that moment, the team was drilling long, thin holes in which to place dynamite, in search of what they hoped was a rich vein of opal amid the surrounding stone. All around this deepest hole were piles of pink or white cantera flecked with spots that might be opals. It was in these piles that Iñaki and Elpidio got to work with their hammers.
To my untrained eye, the many maroon flecks in the cantera looked just like the few that my guides said were actually opals. You have to look carefully for iridescence — sometimes visible only by holding the stone up to sunlight but, in gem-quality opals, visible in most any environment.
The hammering didn’t look difficult but I didn’t join in, content to be dazzled by my natural surroundings. At the end of a couple hours of work, Elpidio kindly presented me with a potato-size piece of cantera that showed an orange opal with a green and white highlight. Though I hadn’t caught opal fever yet, perhaps my gem hound days were still ahead. Iñaki piqued my interest by recounting that he paid for a recent trip to Japan three times over by bringing along opals.
Which brings us to a fascinating aspect of opals — their relative and totally imaginary value. Iñaki said opal sales were relatively easy in Japan because they are more highly valued there than in Mexico, where fewer people have much disposable income. Indeed, when I mentioned Magdalena to Mexican friends, they knew it mostly for tequila (and we drove through plenty paisaje agavero near Magdalena).
Responding to opals’ low local prestige, Iñaki said that by giving tours he hopes to kindle more appreciation of the stone that Wikipedia says was valued above all other gems in 250 BC — itself an interesting factoid, considering opal is not even strictly classified as a mineral and is made of silica, which comprises 59 percent of the Earth’s crust. Opal, though it can be breathtakingly beautiful, is even more useless than diamonds or gold.
Still, later in the day, after a delicious, rustic dinner with the miners (during which we heard the dynamite explode), the mine owner “Sato” showed us a handful of his recent finds, among which nestled a 17-kilate (karat) opal he said will be worth $US12,000 polished. Iñaki thinks it could fetch more.
Potential day trippers take heed: in the highly unlikely event you encounter a drop-dead opal, the mine owners’ concessions stipulate that he decides about any find. If you have the luck of aficionados such as Iñaki and Elpidio, who found 3,000 pesos worth of opals that day, the mine owner may offer a range of deals: from finders keepers, to splitting a sale, to mine owners keepers. If you find nothing, you can still peruse a Magdalena shop with expert assistance.
Contact Oyarvide by WhatsApp or cell: 331-020-2776.