Elbaite

specimen number:
1711637

location:
Barra do Salinas, Minas Gerais, Brazil

description:

Unusual neatly crystallized grouping of elbaite. Neat pink and green colors throughout, this is in great condition.

The Barra de Salinas mining district, located in the Jequitinhonha valley near Coronel Murta in Minas Gerais, Brazil, is a celebrated artisanal underground mining area famous for its complex granitic gem-pegmatites. Geologically, the district features highly fractionated, zoned pegmatite bodies that intruded Precambrian-age metamorphic rocks, including quartzites and schists, during the late stages of the Pan-African-Brasiliano orogeny. Internal pocket zones within these pegmatites allowed for the unrestricted growth of remarkable mineral associations, characterized by multicolored elbaite tourmaline crystals, including the famous bicolored green and pink rubellite varieties, often accompanied by well-crystallized albite, lepidolite, and quartz. Historically, initial surface prospecting and garimpeiro river-bed panning began in the mid-twentieth century, but systematic underground tunneling and shaft-sinking intensified during the 1970s and 1980s as global demand for brazilian gemstones expanded. The district achieved international prominence through major pocket discoveries in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which yielded some of the finest tourmaline specimens ever recorded from the region. Because the gem-bearing cavities are distributed erratically throughout the pegmatite matrix, large-scale industrial mining has never been established, but localized, small-scale artisanal mining and trenching operations remain actively worked by local cooperatives through 2026.

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