Héctor Montes, who runs a family opal business in La Trinidad, Mexico, holding different kinds of freshly polished opals. “There are no two alike,” he said.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times
By Janelle Conaway
Jan. 22, 2023
LA TRINIDAD, Mexico — Héctor Montes has been around opals his entire life and has held a concession from the Mexican government to mine the stone for 40 years. But at 76, he said he could still feel a rush of adrenaline when he picked up a raw opal that had an especially promising glint — he never knows what it will look like in its finished state.
“There are no two alike,” he said of the stones he shapes and polishes. His workshop, strewn with rocks and lapidary equipment, is part of the family opal business that he runs in this community of about 2,500 residents in the central Mexican state of Querétaro, one of the two main regions in the country where opal is mined today.
“I get tired here, but I don’t get bored because of the variety of colors that we have,” Mr. Montes said as he polished an opal using finer and finer grits of sandpaper. “You’re always eager to see how each stone will turn out.”
He pointed to some of the stones he had at hand: fire opals, rainbow opals, peacock opals, among others. The more colors an opal flashes and the more intense those colors are, the higher the quality, Mr. Montes explained.
Opals are not the world’s most valuable stone, he said, because they lack the hardness of some other gems, such as diamonds. “But in beauty,” he added, “there is no stone that can be compared to it.”
Mr. Montes, polishing an opal in his workshop, has been working with the gemstones since he was 12 years old. “I get tired here,” he said, “but I don’t get bored.”Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times
Mr. Montes caught the “fever,” as he called his passion for opal, early on. When he was 5, he would spend time in a nearby jewelry workshop looking through the floor sweepings for any bits of stone that he could sell for a few pesos to spend on candy. By the time he was 12, he was developing his lapidary skills — cutting, shaping and polishing stones.
His grandfather and three uncles were miners, and Mr. Montes inherited a concession to mine a 20-hectare (roughly 50-acre) tract on a hill called El Redentor (the Redeemer). The concession has been in his family since 1894.
Thin veins of opal — Mr. Montes called them “threads” — were deposited here over time as water seeped into the cracks of volcanic rock called rhyolite. Miners in the area excavate small open-pit mines to get at the deposits.
In Mr. Montes’s operation, called Minas de Ópalo El Redentor, crews use small amounts of dynamite and then an air compressor drill to dislodge sections of rhyolite, taking care not to damage the opal.
After that, the process is slow and artisanal, as workers use chisels and sledgehammers to extract chunks of rock and then break them apart, one by one, to see what is inside. Rocks that do not contain significant amounts of visible opal are tossed into a wheelbarrow and hauled to the surface with a pulley.
Mining, Mr. Montes said, is an unpredictable venture that takes persistence, perseverance and a willingness to pick oneself up and start over after failure.
“You can find the fortune that you could never even in your dreams imagine having, but you can also spend your life dreaming that you will find it and never manage to,” he said.
In addition to extracting opal, the family business offers tours to people who want to visit the mine and try their hand at finding a gemstone in the ever-growing mountain of rubble. Visitors are provided with hammers and chisels and can keep any stones they find.
Artisanal miners worked inside an open-air opal mine, where they used homemade fine-point hammers to break chunks of rock apart, one by one.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times
“To work a mine, you need another mine” — in other words, another source of income, said Mr. Montes’s son, Fernando, who heads the tourism operation. Mining by itself is hit or miss, he explained; for every 10 tons of rock removed, the business might recover one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of precious fire opals.
Then there are the rare times when a crew stumbles on a large deposit. The last time it happened at El Redentor was in 2016, Fernando said. And, “with that bonanza, I was able to build my house.”
As Rufina Ugalde, Mr. Montes’s wife and Fernando’s mother, who is involved in the business and manages a small opal shop, said: “There’s nothing certain in mining. It’s like the lottery.”
Small But Distinctive
Mexico is a relatively minor opal producer, lagging far behind Australia and Ethiopia. At Opal Auctions, which bills itself as the world’s largest online marketplace for opals, Mexican opals accounted for about 4 percent of the loose opals sold through the site in 2022, according to Ross Sedawie, the company’s head of business operations. (About 72 percent of the opals sold were from Australia and 20 percent from Ethiopia, he said.)
But Mexican opals are always in demand because of their bright, fiery colors, according to Joel E. Arem, a veteran gemologist who has a Ph.D. in mineralogy and has written extensively on gemstones. “You get a really kick-ass, killer Mexican opal, and it is glorious,” he said.
Opal, like quartz, is composed of silica, a compound that makes up much of the Earth’s crust. In the case of quartz, Dr. Arem explained, the silica crystallizes and forms angular structures; opal, by contrast, is amorphous, a collection of microscopic spheres. Carried by water, these spheres, which are gelatinous in consistency, work their way into tiny spaces within rocks, where they settle and solidify. This process happens all over the planet and produces what is known as common opal, Dr. Arem said.
THERE IS MUCH MORE AT THE NY Times WITH photos. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/fash ... exico.html
“These are stones that have life,” he said, adding that, to him, the vibrant colors found in opals represent the liveliness of Mexican folklore and culture.
Mr. Montes had made a similar point a few days earlier. “Here in Mexico, we have opals in all the colors we could imagine,” he said. “We are a country of privilege that hasn’t known how to value what we have. It’s that simple.”
