Wavellite with Quartz

specimen number:
2133284

location:
Siglo Veinte Mine, Llallagua, Potosi, Bolivia

description:
Colorless crystals of wavellite rich across the front of a quartz crystal matrix. In good condition.

The Siglo Veinte mine, also known as the Siglo XX mine, situated at Llallagua in the Bustillos Province of the Potosi Department, Bolivia, is a historic and globally renowned mining complex famous for hosting the world's largest porphyry tin deposit and producing exceptional specimens of phosphates, including distinct acicular and radiating discoidal aggregates of pale green, white, and yellow wavellite. Geologically, this immense deposit is centered on the Salvadora stock, a highly altered, subvolcanic rhyodacitic porphyry body of Miocene age that intruded into Paleozoic sedimentary rocks, including the thick sandstones of the Catavi Formation. Intense, late-stage hydrothermal mineralization and subsequent supergene alterations generated an incredibly complex network of sulfide-rich veins and late-stage fluid pockets where rare aluminium phosphate species, such as wavellite, vauxite, and paravauxite, crystallized cleanly alongside cassiterite, quartz, and fluorapatite. Historically, organized large-scale extraction at the site commenced at the start of the twentieth century in 1901, and the property was acquired in the 1910s by Simon Iturri Patino, who developed it into a premier global source of industrial tin. Following the Bolivian National Revolution, the mine was nationalized in October 1952 under the state agency Corporacion Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL), serving as a major hub of economic production and labor activism until collapsing global tin prices and economic restructuring forced the permanent cessation of state-sponsored corporate mining in 1987.

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