Agate

Artigas is world-wide reference in agatas and amethysts.

No gemstone is more creatively striped by nature than agate, chalecedony quartz that forms in concentric layers in a wide variety of colors and textures. Each individual agate forms by filling a cavity in host rock. As a result, agate often is found as a round nodule, with concentric bands like the rings of a tree trunk. The bands sometimes look like eyes, sometimes fanciful scallops, or even a landscape with dendrite trees.

 Agate was highly valued as a talisman or amulet in ancient times. It was said to quench thirst and protect from fevers. Persian magicians used agate to divert storms. A famous collection of two to four thousand agate bowls which was accumulated by Mithradates, king of Pontus, shows the enthusiasm with which agate was regarded. Agate bowls were also popular in the Byzantine Empire. Collecting agate bowls became common among European royalty during the Renaissance and many museums in Europe, including the Louvre, have spectacular examples.

History of the agates and amethysts in Artigas - Uruguay.

In century XVIII the kings of Spain already were interested in these semiprecious stones. In 1850 the Germans Becker and Schuch find agates and amethysts in the zone of the Catalan. Only agates were exported in the beginning: the interest by amethysts just began in the first decades of the 900. With the warlike conflicts that characterized half of century XX, as much the production as the export seriously was affected. The certain thing is that this natural wealth was exported exclusively in gross, to very low prices, until the Seventies. It is by those years that the government stimulates his export and industrialization, arising several quarries in the places where the "old canteristas" had made diggings by hand. By that time, in Artigas and Montevideo they appear the first factories where the agates and amethysts are carved incorporating to them added value. As much the quarry production as the one of the factories goes in ascent until principles of the decade of the 90. The Gulf War of the 92, produced a recession in the consumption markets and drastically lowered the production as much of agates as of amethysts in gross. Although the sector has rounded up something, it is very far from having recovered. The loss of the prices forced by the synthetic amethyst, the high mechanization mainly in facetado and the appearance of new producing markets causes that the recovery of the sector is slower. The adjustment to a changing world is the slogan of the moment. The present tendency is of slow but maintained recovery of the consumption markets.

We worked with a permanent stock of our products, being to its disposition by questions or suggestions.