How to Land in Muzo

A helicopter, a yellow chicken, an unmarked hotel room with no windows, and the world's best emeralds.

The helicopter ride to Muzo starts the way any helicopter ride starts. You take off from a small airfield outside Bogotá, climb to whatever altitude the pilot has decided is reasonable today, settle in, and watch the city give way to the green of the Andean foothills. You think you know what the next 1.5 hours are going to feel like. You are wrong.

The thing about flying to Muzo is that Muzo is in a canyon.

Not next to one. In one. The mining town sits on the floor of the Río Minero gorge in western Boyacá, surrounded by walls that rise close to vertically on either side, and the only way to land there by air is to fly over the lip of the canyon and drop. The pilot does not descend gently. There is no gentle descent available. He flies to the rim, the green floor of the world is suddenly right there under your skids, and then the bottom falls out and you go down a thousand metres in what feels like an elevator with the cable cut.

I’ve been on roller coasters. I’ve been in turbulence over the Pacific that made grown men reach for their crucifixes. Nothing has ever produced the specific gut-feeling of that descent into Muzo. It’s not fear, exactly. It’s your inner ear telling you that you are now falling, your eyes telling you the canyon walls are accelerating past at a rate that should not be possible, and your stomach trying to relocate somewhere near your throat. It lasts maybe twenty seconds. It feels like four minutes. The pilot, who has done this a thousand times, is humming something. You hate him. You also love him, because he’s the reason you’re going to be on the ground and not still falling.

Then you’re down. Dust. The smell of jet fuel and wet jungle. A man in a polo shirt walking toward the helicopter with a clipboard. Welcome to Muzo.

The Town

Muzo is not really a town in the way you might be imagining. It’s a mining settlement; a few thousand people, most of them connected to the emerald industry in some way, strung along the canyon floor in a kind of architectural improvisation. There are the company buildings, Muzo International, the operator that holds the modern concession, with its security and offices and proper infrastructure. There are the older buildings from previous regimes, including the ghost of the Carranza era, which haunts the place whether you want it to or not. And there are the houses and shops and small hotels of the people who live there year-round, a mix of concrete and brick and tin and improvisation.

The Hotel

We stayed at a place I will not name. The room had no windows. I don’t mean the window was small. I mean there was no window. The walls were cinderblock, painted a colour that had once been white and was now the colour of old paper. The only light came from a single bulb in the ceiling and the gap under the door. The bed was clean. The sheets were clean. There was a fan. There was, against all reasonable expectation, hot water, sometimes. The bathroom door did not quite close. The shower drain was a hole in the floor with a plastic grate on top. It was, by Muzo standards, a perfectly acceptable hotel room, and I slept fine in it because by the time I got there I had been awake for twenty-two hours and would have slept on the helicopter pad.

The dinner was yellow chicken.

Specifically, gallina criolla, the local free-range chicken, which is yellow because of what it eats, mostly corn and whatever it can scratch up, and which has fat the colour of egg yolk and a flavour about three times more intense than any chicken you’ve had in North America. It was served in a stew with potatoes and a thick orange-yellow sauce, on rice, with an arepa on the side. It was delicious. The fat pooled on top of the broth in a way that would horrify a Vancouver dietician and that I, having descended into Muzo by helicopter that afternoon, found completely justified. I ate two bowls. I drank a beer. I went to my windowless room and slept like the dead.

The Indigenous Statues

The drive from town to the actual mine area takes you past a small clearing where someone, I asked and never got a clear answer, has erected a series of statues in the style of pre-Columbian Muisca and Muzo Indigenous figures. The Muzo people, who give the region and the town and the emerald its name, were the Indigenous nation that mined the deposits before the Spanish arrived, and who fought the Spanish for forty years in one of the most prolonged Indigenous resistances in the history of the conquest. They were eventually destroyed through warfare, disease, and forced labour in the mines they had once worked themselves. Their language is gone, and most of what we know about them comes from Spanish chroniclers who had every reason to misrepresent them.

The statues are not in a museum. They’re at the side of the road, on a patch of grass, weathered by the canyon’s relentless humidity, and they look at you as you drive past with the heavy faces of people who knew this canyon a thousand years before any of us did. There’s something about them that catches you. You don’t expect to be moved on the way to a mine site. I was. The statues are the only acknowledgement, in the entire visual landscape of modern Muzo, that this stone has a history older than the conquest, and that the people who first knew where to dig for it are not represented at any of the meetings.

Police checks. More police checks.

You don’t drive anywhere in the emerald belt without being stopped.

The first checkpoint is at the edge of town. The second is at the turnoff for the mine road. The third is partway up the mine road. The fourth is at the entrance to the concession. There may be a fifth, depending on what’s happening that week and which agency is asserting which jurisdiction. You roll down your window. You hand over your passport, your visa, your letter from the company hosting you, your driver’s papers, and whatever else is requested. The officer looks at everything. He looks at you. He hands it back. You drive on. Four hundred metres later you do it again.

This is not harassment. This is the modern security posture of a region that, within recent memory, was the killing ground of the guerras verdes, the Green Wars, that consumed the emerald industry through the 1980s. Víctor Carranza, the Zar de las Esmeraldas, ran his side of those wars from this canyon. Thousands died. The peace that followed his eventual ascendance, and the further normalisation that followed his death in 2013, is real but recent, and the checkpoints are part of how it’s maintained. The officers are polite. The procedure is efficient. You learn not to be in a hurry, because being in a hurry in Boyacá is something only foreigners do, and they only do it once.

Roadside Emeralds

At one of the checkpoints, I think the third, there is a man selling emeralds out of a wooden box.

He has them in folded papers, the way they’re sold everywhere in the world, and he opens the papers on the hood of the vehicle in front of yours while the police are checking that vehicle’s documents. The officers know him. They don’t seem to mind. He’s part of the landscape. The stones in his papers are mostly small, mostly low-grade, mostly the by-products and tailings that have made it down the chain through whatever informal economy moves stones in this region. They are not what you came for. But they are real emeralds, from this canyon, being sold on a piece of wood balanced on a Toyota’s hood, three hundred metres from the mine that produced them, and there is something about the absurd directness of that transaction that has stayed with me.

I have, on different trips, bought small parcels from men like him. Not for the shop. For the souvenir of the encounter. Six little stones in a folded paper that I keep in a drawer in Vancouver, that nobody will ever set into a ring, and that sometimes I take out and look at when I want to remember the canyon.

The Mine

The mine itself is what you’d expect a serious modern mining operation to be, with one twist you would not expect: this is a hard-rock emerald mine, which is unusual. Most coloured stones come from alluvial deposits, gravel, river gravel, weathered sediment, that you process by washing. Muzo emeralds come from the rock itself. The black calcareous shale of the canyon walls is shot through with veins of calcite and pyrite, and the emeralds form inside those veins, growing slowly out of the chemical interaction between host rock and hydrothermal fluids over tens of millions of years.

You go down into the mine. You wear a helmet. You walk through tunnels that smell like wet stone and diesel. The miners, local men, mostly from families that have been doing this for generations, work the veins with hand tools because the stones are too fragile and too valuable to risk explosives. When a vein opens, the response is careful and practiced. Someone calls a foreman. Someone takes photographs. Someone documents the find. The stones, when they emerge, come out of the rock looking like green fire embedded in black, and the first thing you understand, watching it happen, is that emeralds are not found. They are uncovered, slowly, by people whose patience is the actual value-add of the entire operation.

The stones we saw that day included several pieces that, weeks later, would be cleaned and graded and sent to Bogotá, and from Bogotá to the Geneva auction circuit. None of them came home with us. The really good Muzo material does not move at the mine. It moves in Bogotá, in offices upstairs from the street trade on Avenida Jiménez, where the men who handle the top end of the market sit with parcels they’ve been holding for the right buyer. The mine is the source. The deal is somewhere else.

Karaoke

Of course there was karaoke.

There is always karaoke. It is the universal closing ceremony of any gem trip in any country, and Colombia is no exception. The bar, also unnamed, also probably not in any guidebook, was on the second floor of a building in town, accessed by a staircase with a string of Christmas lights that were on in July, and the room was lit a colour I would describe as “brothel pink” if I were being unkind and “intimate” if I were. The clientele was about sixty percent locals and forty percent visiting traders and mining personnel of various nationalities. The drink was aguardiente, anise-flavoured, clear, served cold, deceptively easy to drink, and the song selection was about eighty percent Vicente Fernández, ten percent vallenato, and ten percent inexplicable English-language ballads from the 1980s.

I sang. I will not tell you what I sang. Keith sang. He will not tell you what he sang. The local mining engineers sang Vicente Fernández with the kind of full-throated commitment that only happens at altitude after a long day, and the room sang back to them. A man who had earlier been the sternest foreman at the mine was now belting out El Rey with his eyes closed and his hand on his chest, and the line between business and life dissolved entirely, the way it always does; we were all just people in a canyon at the end of a day.

We staggered back to the windowless hotel sometime after one. We slept. The helicopter back to Bogotá was at eight. The descent that had terrified me on arrival was, on the way out, fun. The canyon walls are accelerating away from us, the world opening up, the floor giving way to the green plain of the Andean foothills, the air thinning and the sun coming up over the cordillera. I watched it. I drank the bad coffee the pilot had brought in a thermos. I thought about the windowless room, the yellow chicken, the statues, and the man at the checkpoint with his folded papers. I knew, in the way you know these things, that I would be coming back.

What it's actually for

We don’t go on these trips because they’re efficient. They are not. We could, in theory, source most of what we sell through dealers in Bangkok, New York, Geneva, on WhatsApp, in air-conditioned offices, without the helicopters, windowless rooms, karaoke, or road beers. Many of our competitors do exactly this. The stones they sell are real stones and the rings they make are real rings and there is nothing wrong with that business model.

But there is a difference between a stone you bought and a stone you fetched. You can’t always articulate the difference, but it is in the stone, and over time it accumulates in the inventory, in the voice of the people doing the work. The descent into the canyon, the windowless room, the man with the folded papers at the checkpoint, Vicente Fernández at one in the morning at altitude. These are not marketing. These are the actual texture of the trade as it has existed for several hundred years, and being in it changes what you know. What you know changes what you buy. What you buy changes what we put in the case in Vancouver.

The client whose ring has a Muzo emerald in it does not need to know any of this for the ring to be beautiful. But it’s in there. The canyon is in the stone. It’s why we went.