Our Story

The history of the turquoise mines in Baja California, Mexico, reads like an Old West story. Baja California has a rich history. Mexican historians have written about early Californians trading turquoise from Baja California to the Aztec Empire across the Pacific. In fact, studies from the University of Arizona suggest that the turquoise used by the Aztec Empire most likely came from Baja California and the Nevada mountains, rather than from Arizona or other regions. Known as “La piedra de los cielos” (“The Stone from the Skies”), turquoise was and still is a sacred stone for Indigenous peoples. The people of El Rosario, a town in Baja California founded in 1774, knew about these turquoise mountains. During one of the turquoise rushes of the 1970s, a U.S. citizen made a deal with them. They began working with this man, who named the site “The Old Evans Mine.” For years, they extracted tons of precious turquoise, (till today, if you walk the mountains, you can still see the tracks of old airstrips used to land planes over the mine and flew the Turquoise to the USA) They flew tons of Turquoise to the United States and marketed it as “American Turquoise.” (You can read a reference to it in the famous “Turquoise” book by Joe Dan Lowry, the former owner of the Albuquerque Turquoise Museum, in his second revised edition.) By the mid-1990s. Before leaving, he and his crew used machinery to cover the mines with tons of dirt. It is estimated that he removed about 40 tons of turquoise over the years, which has since been sold under many different names as All American Turquoise. In 2015, the Mexican owner of the Old Evans Mine in Baja California passed away. In early 2016, Carlo Muñiz, an adventurer entrepreneur visited the area and started exploring mountain after mountain of these mines by foot and decided to purchase the remaining mining rights from the owner’s family when he saw the potential hidden in them….. This is how our history begun in 2016. After three months of exploration, Carlo Muniz reached an agreement with the previous owners and begun the re-discovering of the mines. At first, we had to uncover the mines from the tons of dirt that had buried them. Soon, we discovered many types of turquoise in a wide range of hues: intense royal blue, Sleeping Beauty blue, deep blue-green, green turquoise and all the colours in between. Some stones are pure with clean colour, while others feature beautiful, unique patterns with red, golden or black matrix. All this remarkable variety comes from these beautiful mountains. We have now been on this turquoise-mining adventure for 11 years. After all this years of exploring and working these mines, we have grown deeply fond of them and are proud to share them with you.